In last couple of days I’ve came across Mouse Eye Tracking Tool launched by PicNet, an australia based company. so I’ve coducted interview with Mr. Guido Tapia, he is Technical Head of Software Development @ PicNet.
Here by Interview starts and I divided it into 2 parts:
Question 1 – Can you describe about your company & services?
PicNet is primarily an IT services company, we do project management, network support, software development and web design (and SEO) for Australian customers.
Finally we have the PicNet Mouse Eye Tracking Service. This tool was written to support our web design, SEO business but in just 2 weeks we have had enormous attention and we are now very excited about this product.
Question 2 – How did you come up with the idea to create Picnet – Mouse Eye Tracking tool?
The PicNet Mouse Eye Tracking Service was born out of need in our services division. We do web design, SEO and online marketing for many large corporations and we wanted to provide an additional service to these customers. Our initial version of the Mouse Eye Tracking service was received so positively by our customers that we decided to make it a publicly available product (after many months of enhancements).
Question 3 – Which types of business owners are getting the most benefit from Mouse Eye Tracking tool?
I think anyone that has a vested interest in their online presence will benefit from the Mouse Eye Tracking service. I mean it requires a lot of work to design a site, analyze its usage and then redesign it, etc, etc. So I think if your online presence can justify this time and effort then this tool can help you maximize the effectiveness of your website.
Question 4 – What makes Picnet – Mouse Eye Tracking tool unique?
Before tools such as this, companies that wanted to evaluate their online users would need to go to the astronomical expenses of hiring ‘eye tracking’ companies. These companies would basically get a small and often times totally unsuitable sample group of people and sit them in front of a monitor with special glasses or cameras and ask them to pretend they are using the site normally.
These eye movements would then be analyzed and the company would come back to you with their recommendations on to how to improve your website.
In recent years the emergence of ‘Virtual Eye Tracking’ systems have shown that you can achieve excellent results without the camera. There is also academic studies that show the correlation between the mouse movements and the area that your users are viewing.
The PicNet Mouse Eye Tracking service takes this theory and applies it to give you the benefits of eye tracking with real users of your web site for a very low cost (free option available).
Another great differentiator of the PicNet Mouse Eye Tracking service is that it is very easy to get going. You take a few lines of code provided to you when you register, you put it in your footer and your off. Analyzing the results is also simple as there are no installations required as the whole system is web based.
Question 5 – Which is the most useful feature in Mouse Eye Tracking?
The Mouse Eye Tracking Service has in total 4 modes of analysis, they are all extremely useful but all achieve slightly different goals. Firstly we have the heat maps, the heat maps consolidate the interactions on a page by all the users to your site. This gives you a very high level summary of how a page is being used. Let’s take the example below.
This screen show shows us the usage of our home page over the last 2 weeks. We can see that in that time our visitors have been interested in our Project Management & Consulting service above the other services that we provide. This is probably due to some marketing material that we recently sent out promoting this side of the company. We can also see that users are reading our short marketing message about the company.
The PicNet Mouse Eye Tracking service also provides ‘click only’ heat maps. These heat maps do not try to interpret eye activity from the mouse they only show the clicks.This allows you to see exactly how users are using your website, how long they are spending in each area, etc. Finally the PicNet Mouse Eye Tracking Service gives you a tool to visualize the way users navigate your web site. Let’s see an example of that.
Here we can see the initial screen shot showing us that from our home page (index) the majority of our visitors are going to about us and our IT Products page.After this the most popular page is the software development services page. I went ahead and clicked this node. This takes us to the second screen shot showing us that users are going from software development to it services and products.
This lets us make some assumptions, why are users going from our home page to software development back to the services page? Is it because they are not finding the service they are looking for in the software page? This is the kind of thinking that this tool inspires and it’s the kind of thinking that leads to better web sites.
Question 6 – What is the data collection method of Picnet – Mouse Eye Tracking tool?
This question can have a really long technical answer but I will try to keep it simple. PicNet developed its own custom mouse recording engine for the Mouse Eye Tracking Service. This engine records all mouse interactions, that is movements, clicks and scrolls. Sounds simple right? It is actually extremely difficult to do this and still be able to guarantee that the performance of web pages will not be affected at all. You can with confidence put this on your web site and know that your users will not experience any negative effects from this tool.
Well that’s about all I can say without getting into the nitty-gritty of caches, buffers, JavaScript issues, browsers, etc, etc. Let’s just say that it works and it works really well.
Question 7 – Which kind of metrics & dimensions will be display to the user of eye tracking tool?
The PicNet Mouse Eye Tracking service was always intended to be a visual tool, to show easy to understand pictures that inspire the management team into action. As such we leave metrics and tables and charts to the existing plethora of web analytics tools out there. Not that these tools are not valuable, in fact it was always the intention that the PicNet Mouse Eye Tracking Service be used in conjunction with these tools. There is nothing like hard numbers to support the assumptions you make from using this tool.
Question 8 – Can you give url of live demo or virtual tour of Eye tracking tool ?
You can see the live demo of PicNet Eye Tracking tool in this video.
Question 9 – What are the pricing of Eye tracking tool ?
As for the cost, it is free. However premium services cost $2000 / domain / year. The differences between the two services can be found here:
http://www.picnet.com.au/MET/NewUser.mvc/Faq
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