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FLIGHT RECORDER and TUNNEL VISION are ways to track where people are looking in text, image, or web documents.  This allows us to gain a better understanding of what attracts someone's attention, what holds a person's attention, how a person navigates through a document, what parts a person finds particularly interesting or confusing, and such.  Below are some examples of how these tools can be used:

web usabiliby study - Will people get confused when trying to find information in your proposed web pages?  A Web page has only a few seconds to gain a person's share of mind in real-world web time.  If you cannot find what you want on a web page, how many seconds before you click back to the portal that got you there?  FLIGHT RECORDER allows us to trace mouse movements within a single web page in real time, allowing the usability engineer to find confusing spots within a page.  By capturing sub-second level time and motion data in addition to click-through data, we are able to guage the level of frustration and specific points of frustration that a person encounters in navigating a web site.  This is much more rich in information than simply knowing that people click out of a site after it is onoine.

physician detail piece - Where does a physician spend the most time in viewing a detail (advertising) piece?  What is the order in which detail points are studied?  On this demo, move your mouse on the text of the advertisement to show where you are looking.  When you are done, post your data and then play it back in real time.  (Current version will only save data from Netscape.)

persuasive advertising - Do people follow the points of an advertisement in any particular order?  How much share of mind is taken by the graphic elements in an emotion-laden advertisement?  Does this advertisement cause people to look at the picture?  On this demo, move your mouse over elements of the ad that you wish to see.  When you are done, post your data and then play it back in real time.  (Current version will only save data from Netscape.)

How Tunel Vision works:

Click here to find out how time and space data are collected from a Web browser.  The technology to do this is not very new - Dr. Owen posted his famous Stroop Test somewhere around 1997 after Netscape introduced JavaScript.  (The Stroop test is a game in which people with certain kinds of learning disabilities actually do better than the rest of us.)

Putting this all together so that it keeps a database on a server was not so easy, and creating an engine that makes it possible to quickly create the materials for a marketing study required a lot of work.  FLIGHT RECORDER and Tunnel Vision are now developed to a point where each page of a study programmed and posted on a server in about a day.  Contrast this with the time and expense of scheduling a research facility to do individual depth interviews, of the time and expense for travel between cities, and such. 

The greatest potential for this technique is not simply to remotely watch how a person moves through a page of advertising, but to combine it with automatically generated probing questions (with branching and piping survey techniques).  E.g.,

Doctor, I noticed that you spent a lot of time studying Chart 1 in this detail piece.  Was this because it is
personally relevant
other (explain in the box below)