Is Boring Good?

in Visual Design

heat map

A new tool for in-page analytics is being released, called Attention Wizard. According to its promoters, Attention Wizard PREDICTS the path that a person’s eyes would take around a web page before the page is viewed by humans. That is, it uses eye-tracking and visual attention research to make its predictions.

The tool has many uses, but it is particularly intended for pre-release design, before a site has the traffic to see how visitors will interact with a web page. Once you have lots of traffic, you can use in-page analytics programs like ClickTale. Attention Wizard might also be good for convincing clients that their website is not up to par.

Attention Wizard is based on artificial intelligence algorithms that simulate human visual processing and attention. The output of its analysis is an “attention heatmap” of a web page, that “predicts where real people would look during the first few seconds of their visit.” In a recent interview, the company CEO stated that the best pages for company websites for getting site visitors to take the action you want tend to be the boring ones.

Links:
Attention Wizard
ClickTale

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