Research Online Behavior
Conducting research on online behavior is important, whether you are studying e-commerce / consumer behavior or general browsing patterns and even social media use. Introducing PageGazer, an innovative solution that helps you discover how people use websites to browse, learn, but also the buying behavior process by bridging the worlds between attention, perception, and behavior. Built by cognitive psychologists and experts in machine learning. Keep reading for some ideas for methods and techniques you can employ in your research.
Contents:
1. Measure Human Attention and Engagement Levels on Websites
Understand attention, understand behavior. All behaviors are influenced by brain processes for attention, perception and cognition. Behavior does not happen in isolation. Research tools must be able to capture these complex cognitive processes, in order to truly provide insights on behavior, such as perceptual biases and cognitive mechanisms.
PageGazer facilitates detailed analysis of user interactions with website elements like text, images, and menus, shedding light on attentional patterns during browsing. By correlating eye and mouse movements with neuroimaging data, researchers can probe the neural correlates of online behavior.
Through tasks designed to simulate real-world browsing scenarios, researchers can observe cognitive processes like memory, decision-making, and problem-solving. For example, tasks may prompt users to locate specific information or complete navigation challenges, revealing attentional biases and search strategies.
Example Task: Participants search for specific information within a news article, revealing attentional biases via webcam-based eye tracking. This method identifies fixation clusters around key text or images, informing our understanding of information processing. You can also enable mouse tracking to study consumer behavior through find and click tasks.
By leveraging PageGazer's capabilities, researchers can create free browsing studies to examine user attention and engagement in naturalistic settings. By utilizing various study templates and through tasks mirroring real-world interactions, insights into search patterns, navigation expectations, and more can be gleaned, enriching our understanding of consumer behavior and psychology.
2. Study Consumer Behaviors
Consumer behaviors are complex. Many factors influence purchase decisions and even post-purchase behaviors.
One way that PageGazer facilitates the study of consumer behaviors is through its ability to track users' gaze patterns and mouse movements as they navigate through websites. By analyzing such physiological data, researchers can gain insights into how consumers visually scan product listings, search for information, and evaluate options before making a purchase decision. This allows researchers to identify factors that influence consumer attention, engagement, and preference for specific products or features, and ultimately understand the purchasing behavior process.
Additionally, Pagegazer enables researchers to conduct A/B tests and experiments to evaluate the impact of different design elements, content presentations, and user interface features on consumer behaviors. For example, researchers can compare the effectiveness of different product images, call-to-action designs, or promotional strategies in influencing purchase intentions and behaviors.
3. Analyzing the Impact of Design and Content on User Perception
The design and content of a website play a significant role in shaping users' perceptions, emotions, and behaviors. Thus design and content are powerful factors that influence the overall online experience, ultimately guiding their decision-making processes. To analyze users' perception effectively, researchers can utilize various methods, including A/B studies, in order to pinpoint the impact of design and content.
In an A/B study, researchers can compare different versions of website elements, such as descriptions, headline wording, or imagery, to assess how these variations impact user perception. By observing user behavior and collecting data on interactions with each version, researchers can gain insights into the effectiveness of different design and content choices in shaping user perception. Read more about how to use PageGazer to assess the impact of UX design.
Looking ahead, Pagegazer plans to integrate surveys and questionnaires into its platform, providing researchers with additional tools to analyze user perception. With this feature, researchers can present participants with different design and content options on the website and then follow up with questions to gather qualitative feedback. By combining eye-tracking and mouse-tracking data with users' inputs from surveys, researchers can draw comprehensive conclusions about users' perception and preferences.
Overall, by leveraging A/B studies and future survey capabilities, researchers can gain valuable insights into how design and content elements influence user perception on websites.
4. Exploring Cognitive Biases
Some cognitive biases can be studied by designing tasks within PageGazer that prompt users to interact with specific elements or scenarios on a website while tracking their eye movements and interactions.
Here are some cognitive bias examples:
- Framing Bias: Through tasks that present information in different formats or contexts, researchers can examine how the framing of content influences users' interpretations and decisions. You can create A/B tests with different framing of the same information and see if consumer purchasing behavior on a website will subsequently change.
- Recency and Primacy Bias: conduct controlled experiments by manipulating the presentation order of content elements on webpages. By presenting information in different sequences and analyzing users' responses, researchers can directly assess the impact of recency and primacy biases on user perceptions and actions.
- Confirmation Bias: Researchers can observe how users selectively focus on information that confirms their existing beliefs or hypotheses while ignoring contradictory evidence. This bias can be studied by analyzing users' gaze patterns and interaction behaviors when exposed to different types of information on a website.
- Social Proof Phenomenon: By observing user behavior, researchers can identify patterns related to social proof, such as which types of social proof are most influential in shaping user decisions.
