"Reaction [beta]"
Five days: Amazon.co.uk 10 May 2006
Welcome to day three
Over the course of this week, we're publishing Eye Tracking heatmaps from five websites. We'll give you our thoughts on each and hopefully you'll give us your questions, comments and analysis. More information about the study can be found in our original announcement.
Day one saw us tackle Dixons homepage and on day two we explored Currys'. Today, we'll be taking a look at Amazon...
About Amazon
I'm guessing that you're pretty familiar with this organisation already ("like d'uh, Etre!"), so I'll keep it brief. Founded as Cadabra.com by Jeff Bezos in 1994 and launching in 1995, Amazon.com today offers "Earth's Biggest Selection". Amazon was one of the iconic stocks of the dotcom bubble, but didn't turn a profit until the fourth quarter of 2002. Since then the firm has turned net profits of $35 million in 2003, $588 million in 2004 and $359 million in 2005.
Website: www.amazon.co.uk
The heatmap
The white line represents the page fold at our 1024 x 768 monitor resolution. Users needed to scroll to view content located beneath.
See a full size version of this heatmap
Our findings
Amazon's homepage gets users to the type of product that they are interested in quickly - as is demonstrated by the intensity of eye fixations over "BOOKS", "ELECTRONICS & PHOTO", "MUSIC" and "DVD" in the main navigation menu.
It's interesting to note that Amazon's search feature attracted more attention than those found on the other homepages we tested. Indeed 15% of users performed a search query on Amazon.co.uk. This may have reflected the fact that users were more familiar with this company and its product line. Perhaps they felt more confident that Amazon would have what they wanted to find, and therefore attempted to search for it directly, rather than browsing around.
Placing the "FREE Trial" advert in the top-left-hand corner of the page demonstrates a very cunning sales ploy. Amazon knows that users regularly look at the company logo to confirm that they have arrived at the right website. And where is the company logo usually found? That's right - in the top-left-hand corner of the page. So by placing an advert in this space, and moving the logo over to the right, they exploit users' expectations of how websites typically work. During our tests, this little "trick" unwittingly exposed around 50% of users the DVD Rental campaign. Sneaky!
Amazon employs a similar trick to expose people to its "STAR CHOICE" feature. The company knows that users past web experience will lead them to expect the left-hand navigation menu to appear directly beneath the page header. So they put the "STAR CHOICE" feature there instead (positioning the left-hand navigation menu below it). Again, during our tests, this technique exposed the feature to around 50% of users that perhaps wouldn't have seen it had it been located elsewhere. Double-sneaky!
These "tricks" are interesting as they go against the traditional usability mantra of "make it as easy as possible for users to achieve their goals". Amazon succeeds in creating an engaging user experience without adhering to this guideline - but only because it makes things just a tiny bit more difficult. Our users weren't upset by these ploys because the page layout deviated only slightly from their expectations. Ok, so the logo wasn't in the top left-hand corner, but it was very close by - and while the left-hand navigation menu wasn't at the top of the column, it was next in line.
Amazon's design is also more effective than Dixons and Currys at drawing attention to its "Free Shipping" offer. As you'll remember, Dixons and Currys placed their "Free Shipping" offers in the middle of the right-hand column on their homepages. Amazon places its equivalent feature directly beneath its main navigation and search bars - an area that received the most user attention. This ensured the offer was seen.
Yet despite these flashes of inspiration, many elements of Amazon's site performed poorly - the main "DVD RENTAL - FREE TRIAL" banner, in particular (although users may have already seen the similar offer in the top-left-hand corner of the page and therefore probably didn't need to give this banner too much attention).
The "WHAT'S NEW", "Hot 100 Books" and "Hot 100 Music" features (found in the right-hand column) attracted little attention from users. Maybe the advertisement for virgin.net broadband - placed directly above - led users to believe that the remainder of this column would be reserved for third-party advertising.
The "Make Money", "MORE TO EXPLORE" and "TOP FIVE QUESTIONS" sections in the left-hand column were also rarely examined by our users. "Make Money" was probably ignored because it targeted a different demographic group (i.e. authors, developers and associates, rather than consumers); this excuse doesn't apply to "MORE TO EXPLORE" and "TOP FIVE QUESTIONS" however - although it could be said that the contents of these two features are less attractive than the product features located elsewhere on the page.
The central column attracted limited visual attention (at least, compared to the main navigation menu and left-hand navigation menu). Product images performed well, but the lengthy textual descriptions were rarely read in any detail. Such a finding leads us to believe that users focus on the high-level task of "browsing" when interacting with homepages, rather than the low-level task of "inspecting". That is, they "browse" homepages like Amazon's picking out products of interest, before clicking through to their product detail pages to "inspect" them in more depth. And it is at this point that they are most likely to want to persevere with lengthy descriptions.
Over to you
So that's our take. Now, over to you. Do you agree with our findings, or disagree? Perhaps you've noticed something we've missed. We'd love to hear from you...
...and if you're interested in commissioning an Eye Tracking study of your own site, please don't hesitate to get in touch
Next article: Five days: MarksAndSpencer.com
Previous article: Five days: Currys.co.uk
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7 comments so far
Travis 10 May 2006 01:27 PM
Best yet! Thanks etre :-)
Sam 10 May 2006 02:34 PM
These are excellent, how accurately are the hotspots recorded when considering all the sites require users to scroll?
Also, is it possible effective design accounts for lower eye registration in areas where an element is digested more quickly?
These results account for users "Just browsing" but have you compared the sites where users are tasked with a range of purchases and fact finding etc? I would have thought casual browsing accounts for a small proportion of their actual visitors.
Ragdoll 10 May 2006 06:34 PM
It still sells; check out the warmest spot below the page fold.
I did think it was interesting, however, that in the last two studies, you mention that nobody even looked at the logo in the top left, yet in this study you blame the users looking at the free DVD rental offer on the fact that users look for the logo first.
Is there an explanation for this contradiction?
Aimee McCarthy 10 May 2006 07:02 PM
Not sure I see it as a contradiction, Ragdoll.
I took from Etre's initial posts and the comments from other contributors that: "most people took a look at the browser title bar and the URL before the homepage had loaded to orientate themselves", and that "Users could, or course, have caught the Dixons logo in their peripheral vision and may have been able to recognise the brand in this manner". I expect this is why only 18% of users actually fixed on the Dixons logo.
Amazon haven't actually used the space in the same way as Dixons and Currys, so users glancing across the top left corner of the screen (either through habit or to orient themselves) won't have seen what they expected (confirmation that they were on the Amazon site, or "a logo") and therefore are likely to have taken more time investigating this anomoly.
Etre 10 May 2006 07:21 PM
Sam: Our eye tracking equipment takes scrolling into account, so the results are very accurate.
There’s no two ways about it, effective design can definitely reduce the amount of attention required to digest content. That’s why it’s important to capture what people say and do when running these studies (i.e. a full set of usability metrics) - rather than rely upon the eye tracking data alone - if you want to be able to draw distinctions between what was absorbed quickly and what was glossed over.
Per the discussion on the Dixons post: Browsing does account for a smaller proportion of web page visits than task-based activity, but we believe that studying it is still important. The programmes that we run for clients are typically task-based, though in this one we chose to take an unconstrained approach that we could make observations about general homepage usage patterns. We may run a task-based study in the future if there's enough interest.
Ragdoll: Congratulations on spotting the missing finding! Seems that users that ventured below the fold were also interested in venturing below the belt-line ;P
Aimee’s post pretty much sums up our feeling on the logo / DVD rental issue (Thanks Aimee!). We aren’t saying that nobody ever looks at a company’s logo. We’re saying that fewer users looked at the Dixons and Currys logos than we might have expected (at least, according to conventional usability wisdom).
Aga Bojko 10 May 2006 08:07 PM
Nice analysis. However, one important thing that seems to be missing is the explanation of the the measures analyzed and the heatmap itself. Different measures can mean different things and there is already quite a bit of literature on this topic.
As there are various types of eye movement measures, there are also different types of heatmaps -- heatmaps representing the number of fixations, mean fixation duration, percentage of participants who fixated on any given area etc. Your analyses mention subject percentages but the heatmaps do not appear to be subject percentage heatmaps.
Another interesting element would be a legend. What do the colors indicate? While it seems quite intuitive that red = more intensity, it would be useful to know what it means exactly (e.g., 10+ fixations? 20+ fixations? Gaze time of 500+ ms? 1000+ ms?). These values are customizable and it is impossible to know what they are unless they are included in the legend.
Aga Bojko
Sr. User Experience Specialist
Etre 11 May 2006 10:09 AM
Aga: Thanks for the compliment. The heatmaps represent relative fixation length, while the percentages quoted represent the number of users that fixated on a given area. These are two different metrics. The colours on the heatmap represent the percentage of time that users (as a group) spent looking at each element during their sessions; thereby providing an indication of the distribution of attention across the homepage.
You’re right, a legend would be helpful – We’ll add them as soon as we can.
As you point out, different measures can mean different things, and there are many metrics that can be reported. We’ve only presented a small subset here as we wanted to keep things simple and accessible for readers.