Editor's note: Mike Bartels is the research director for eye-tracking firm Tobii Pro Insight in North America.

The consumer experience is a visual experience. And if you don’t believe me, just try completing your next trip to the grocery store with your eyes closed. You probably won’t get very far, because all of the crucial components of shopping – products, displays, pricing, navigation, promotion, checkout – are presented almost exclusively for our sense of sight. This is why eye-tracking technology has become such an integral part of shopper, retail and packaging research. To study visual behavior with an eye tracker is to observe firsthand the experience of shoppers as they browse the aisles of the store.

This probably isn’t news to anyone reading this article. You’ve all heard of eye-tracking by now. You’ve seen the heat maps and read the articles and maybe even conducted your own studies. Analyzing visual behavior data has become a standard marketing research tool and outside of the industry this technology is making a name for itself as well. Lately I’ve noticed that when I tell people that I’m an eye-tracking researcher, the confused stares that I’ve grown accustomed to receiving have become nods of recognition. That’s a big deal! It means that both in this little research niche and in the general population, eye-tracking has finally arrived. However, the growing visibility of eye-tracking is not what I’m most excited about. Actually it’s just the opposite. The greatest advancement in the field of eye-tracking research right now is its newfound invisibility.

Today’s wearable eye tracker allows discrete testing of anything, anywhere, anytime. Gone are the days of the clunky tethered sci-fi contraptions that used to be the standard for collecting data in the real world. No longer does using an “unobtrusive system” mean running your study in an artificial lab environment or on a computer screen. For researchers seeking insight into the authentic shopping experience, this is truly a game-changer.

A brief history lesson

To appreciate the impact of this innovation, a brief history lesson is in order. Eye-tracking itself has been around for over a century, and the first head-mounted system arrived on the scene more than 60 years ago. This “apparatus” (shown in Figure 1) was developed by Hartridge and Thompson in the late 1940s1. It consisted of a microscope, camera and light source screwed into a long metal bench protruding from a mouth plate, which the participant held with his teeth to keep the eye tracker in place. It was ... obtrusive to say the least and the pace of progress in developing head-mounted eye trackers that were both subtle and accurate was quite slow.

As recently as the late 2000s, if you wanted to study the visual behavior of a shopper in an actual store, you would most likely be following them down the aisles with a computer in a shopping cart connected by a thick cable to an eye tracker that looked a little like something out of A Clockwork Orange. The calibration was difficult, the headset was uncomfortable and the participant’s point of view was partially obstructed. To put it gently, it was not an ideal research scenario.

Over the past few years wearable technology has made several major strides, the result of which is a tool that is designed to be far more conducive to naturalistic shopper research than past generations of eye trackers. The specific advancements that made this possible include:

  • Camera miniaturization: The cameras that record the position of the eye are now small enough to rest on the tip of a matchstick.
  • Lightweight, durable design: The bulky, neck-wrenching metal headsets of the past have given way to a glasses form, made from ultralight, ultra-strong plastics.
  • Improved imaging: Multiple high-speed, high-resolution eye cameras coupled with wide angle HD video of the environment yield better overall data quality.
  • Connectivity and storage improvements: Gigs and gigs of data now fit on tiny memory cards and can be transmitted in real time via Wi-Fi or Bluetooth.
  • Ease-of-use enhancements: Setup, calibration and analysis have been simplified. Anyone with basic training can successfully run a study with one of these new wearables.

So what does this mean for researchers interested in shopper behavior? It means that eye-tracking can now be more easily integrated into real-world research. In the past, if you chose to add eye-tracking in your study, there were almost always compromises. You could test in a real store but the comfort, mobility and visibility of the tested shoppers would be impacted by the equipment that they were forced to wear. Alternatively, you could test in a lab or screen environment using an unobtrusive stand-alone eye tracker but then you would miss out on the authenticity of observing shoppers in a real shopping environment. In either case, the validity of your research could be called into question because the true consumer experience was not examined. The new generation of wearable systems has restored that validity and the quality of shopper insights available through eye-tracking has been enhanced.

Pivoted most of our work

As an eye-tracking researcher, I’ve witnessed firsthand the effect of this movement toward hardware invisibility. Over the years, my team has tested real stores, mock stores, virtual stores, mock shelves, projected shelves, individual products, rendered products and just about every other consumer stimuli you could imagine. Because of the advances in the latest wearable trackers, we have pivoted most of our work to real shopper contexts. The results that we are able to produce during live shopping research are not only more realistic but also more specific, more contextual and ultimately more actionable. Let’s take a look at a few case examples from real research studies conducted with-eye tracking glasses to illustrate what can be discovered using this approach to consumer research.

Last year, we conducted a project that included testing a total of 400 shoppers in 45 retail stores located across 16 cities within seven countries. As you might expect, this was a challenging undertaking, one that would not have been possible just a few years ago. Wearable eye-tracking provided us with two crucial advantages in this research.

First, there was the issue of logistics. The shipping, setup and data collection costs of older head-mounted eye-tracking systems would have added significant dollars to the budget and overtaxed our fielding resources as well. Because we were able to use compact and lightweight eye-tracking glasses, equipment transport was cheap and simple. Because the eye tracker was easy to operate, we didn’t need to have a seasoned eye-tracking guru manning every location, just a tech with proper training and a few studies’ worth of applied experience.

Second, and perhaps more importantly, wearable eye-tracking allowed us to directly address several client objectives that we otherwise would not have been able to. The overall aim of this study was straightforward: to analyze parents and children as they shop in the toy category. However, within this broad approach there were several more focused goals, centered on cultural and store-specific differences. The client’s ultimate rationale for fielding in such a wide variety of locations was to explore the unique experience of approaching, browsing and selecting products in different environments all over the world – just what eye-tracking glasses allowed us to do.

Visibility is everything

When it comes to store signage, visibility is everything. That makes it a great application for eye-tracking research. So why isn’t every retailer, brand and sign designer using this tool to evaluate shopper attention? Part of the reason is that signage visibility can only be studied in context. You can focus-group the copy and taste-test the colors but in order to evaluate whether a given sign catches the eye, you need to test it in an actual store.

We recently conducted an eye-tracking study in two locations of a major variety store chain. The goal was to observe and analyze the entire shopper journey, from entry to exit. Of particular interest was the effectiveness of different types of signage in catching the eye and engaging the consumer. Which types of signs are most likely to be seen? Which ones catch the eye earliest in the browsing process? Which ones tend to engage the consumer most effectively? We used specialized software and a team of data coders to review the full shopping sessions and extract each instance of viewing the targeted sign types.

This approach allowed us to delve deeply into the consumer experience. For example, we looked at the relative visibility of two specific promotional sign types: talker signs that lay flat against the shelf of products and flag signs that extend outward from the shelf at a 90-degree angle. The number and size of these signage types was comparable in the stores tested, so we were able to explore visibility in a direct side-by-side comparison.

As shown in Figure 2, our results indicated that talker signs were far more effective in terms of catching the eye (visual hits) and capturing interest (time engaging). These signs were viewed about twice as often as flag signs and for more than three times as long. However, this isn’t the whole story. Further analysis of the data revealed that flag signs tended to be seen more quickly than talkers (time until notice).

Thus, the eye-tracking data didn’t simply pick a winner; it revealed the specific visibility advantages and disadvantages of each signage type. The results suggest that talker signage is the best medium for must-see communications and messaging that take more time to process. Flag signage, on the other hand, is best used for capturing brief, early attention of shoppers as they approach or pass by a given aisle. This example covers only a sliver of the full study findings but it illustrates well the kind of insights that can be drawn from eye-tracking live, uninterrupted shopping experiences. If true context is important to your study, a discrete wearable tracker is a recommended way to go.

Tough one to answer

When you go shopping, how do you decide which products to purchase? That’s a tough one to answer because it depends on the category, the store, the purpose of your trip, how hungry you are, how much time you have and a variety of other variables. If you asked 20 people this question, you’d probably get 20 different answers and those answers may not even address the core matter of how we choose what to buy. Consumer decision-making is not rocket science but it is complicated. In order to study it, the tools that you use must be naturalistic, objective and precise. Thankfully, modern wearable eye trackers meet those criteria.

The underlying drivers of product choice were the focus of a study that we conducted for the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in late 2014. The rationale for this study came out of the acknowledgement that survey and questionnaire methods, although very useful, do not tell the full story of the shopper’s decision-making process. The FDA sought to improve the validity of its research methods by incorporating real consumer visual behavior data. Fielding of this study took place in multiple grocery stores on the East Coast and included analysis of behavior within three different product categories.

In examining shopper choice, we isolated and analyzed visual attention to several elements that are common to most food products (Figure 3). These included pricing, imagery, branding, health claims and the Nutritional Facts label. Because product choice is primarily a visual process, assessing attention to these elements provided us with a unique vantage into the shopper’s method of deciding what to buy. The FDA was specifically interested in the role of health and nutrition information in selection and we were able to show it exactly how often consumers considered this package feature.

Studies like this one are not just valuable to an organization like the FDA. The tools and methodology described above are now commonly applied by retailers, brands, universities and marketing research agencies. That’s because this type of study provides two important pieces of information. One, it illuminates the cognitive process of shoppers as they make their purchase decisions. Two, it provides directional data for adapting packages, signage and other store elements to more effectively communicate with shoppers. Armed with these two categories of results, stakeholders in consumer behavior are in a better position to attract the attention of customers to the most crucial elements of their products or stores and ultimately increase sales.

Turned a corner

In the past few years, eye-tracking technology has turned an important corner. Fielding a study in an authentic context is no longer a compromise between accuracy and realism, the process of analysis is more efficient and user-friendly and the logistical hurdles of the past have been overcome. In short, the barriers to adoption of this research tool are tumbling down all over the place. Nowhere is this more evident than in the field of shopper insights, where more researchers than ever are leveraging wearable eye-tracking to see the store through the eyes of their customers.

REFERENCES
1www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC512134/?page=8