Find out how people View your website and which areas of the page are getting most of the attention.
Just enter a URL and get a heat map on top of it.
http://www.feng-gui.com/
Please note that the service is in the Alpha phase. |
This looks pretty cool – but how accurate can this really be? |
hows does this work? does it get stats from somewhere, surely not. |
I think it's based on how the human eye works.
If it was a completly one on one colour web site (black on white, yellow on blue etc) with no pictures the eye looks to the middle first, then up, to the left, to the right and finaly down to the bottom. (don't ask how people work this out, I just wrote about it in my Media Studies courswork)
I would assume that with graphic based sites the eyes focus on the brighter colours first then the duller ones (based on results i've seen on that site) |
Are you sure it's anything to do with the eyes? It could be just for where the cursor goes. And cursor trackers are far from helpful (e.g. I just put the cursor out of the way when I dont need it – look at the right-hand column of Microsoft's site) |
Nice – it tells me that on my blog, my actual posts get no attention, but everything else does....
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It's like Alexa stats.
Looks good and authoritative. People will link to it.
But it's not based on anything real.
:)
For Google Blogoscoped, it says that people mainly focus on the navigation, which is BS. Here's an example of an actual Google heat map done as part of an eyetracking study, and the feng-gui heatmap (which suggests that the logo and the 5th or so result are the most noticed!):
http://blogoscoped.com/files/feng-gui.jpg |
I'm happy to learn that visitors are attracted by the background of my website ^^ http://www.feng-gui.com/files/heatmaps/772238c5-2f2f-4aef-ba41-c7535da6b1bf.png |
Statistics show their visit like this:
www.webspace.co.il Windows 2003 Internet Explorer 6.0 Referer: unknown |
You can put a link to http://www.feng-gui.com/ to your blog etc. and you will see a lot of heatmaps generated by you blog readers. There are many, many Finnish language sites being tested now... ;-) |
Philipp, If you take a positive look at the comparison of 'eyetools' result and feng-gui result of google search, you can notice that in general, they are not quite different.
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What I mean by 'not quite different' is that the triangle of the hotspots is almost the same. the real different between feng-gui and eyetools is that eyetools are using real people and feng-gui uses neural algorithm which mimiks human visual attention. |
I think the algorithms get it at least partly wrong. Of course you might be lucky to mimic what really happens with human visitors, but that can't be valuable data for site owners doing usability studies (who don't want to rely on guesses). E.g. for this blog it suggests that people mostly focus on the navigation, and that's just not true. |
You are absolutly right. The ViewFinder heatmap service is a tool for web designers who wish to realize upfront, which areas will get alot of attention and which will get less. It does not mimik a complex visual search or navigation of site viewers. |