We worked with iTracking Research last summer to develop a brand new website for their company. iTracking’s founders, Bill Harwood and Mike Whitson, were a lot of fun throughout the project. We became intrigued by their work in the process, and thought we’d learn a little more about it to share with our blog readers.

iTracking’s slogan, helping you see what they see, sums up their work quite well. The company uses state-of-the-art technology to interpret eye movements as an expression of brain function, allowing you to understand what people look at, for how long, and the route their eye gaze takes. Their research offers valuable insight on media and marketing, usability, scientific research, product and packaging design, and software. I sat down with Bill and Mike to learn a little more about the company and the cutting-edge work they do.

FR:  In a couple of sentences (I know how much you guys love to talk), what exactly is eye tracking research?

M: We’re able to precisely track where a person looks by measuring the characteristics of their eye and being able to save and quantify that.

B:  (joking) Oh, Mike had to go for the nerd answer. This is my simple answer. We can track and follow what your eyes are looking at. From that info – what you look at, how long you look at it, in what order—we can determine what you’re really paying attention to, and what you’re confused by.  And with solid data, we can determine how you are responding to what you are looking at.  

FR:  How did you guys begin working together?  What made you decide to start your own company?

M: We’re neighbors and happened to both be at a summer get-together. Bill mentioned some research he was working on and that he needed some help. I offered to help before I even really knew it was eye tracking.

B: You were in school and needed a research project. So, we thought this might work great.  We ended up working together on an eye tracking project studying how people use visual data to solve chemistry problems–wonderfully nerdy stuff.

Through this project we began to realize that if we could learn all sorts of things by studying how people look at molecules, we could really look at anything. We could draw statistically clear conclusions about individuals and groups.  We could probably apply this in lots of places—media, product development, scientific research.

We became aware of the Grow Iowa fund that could help fund some of our work. It was small, but enough to get us started. We then took on a local bank as a free project, and analyzed their websites. The study was successful and we were on our way.

M: We discovered some surprising finds. That was our “ah-ha” moment. A few people at the bank really felt they really understood their website well. They were surprised that how they worded things or where they put things impacted how people behaved on the site. This is when we realized we could really offer a service; really help people.

FR:  So, we’ve talked some about the types of things you can learn from eye tracking.  Do people ever come to you hoping to learn about something that eye tracking cannot teach you?

M: You can’t do everything with eye tracking. We can tell you how much someone looked at something. But we can’t tell you how much they liked something.

B: If we just ask someone to look at something, we can only track what they did – what they looked at, how long.  But, we can use other research tools along with it to dig deeper. We can combine the quantitative research with qualitative.

M: The eye tracking industry has sort of a snake oil reputation right now – there are agencies adding it as an adjunct without a strong statistical, theoretical background or any knowledge of the neuroscience behind it.  That’s not how we do things – we have the research experience, and we validate everything.

B:  Eye tracking is the newer thing. People tend to stick to the tried and true even if the new could do a better job.  For example, focus groups have issues, but people keep using them. Participants feed off of each other—how real is that? We do our studies on individuals that we can then pull together into subgroups that fit a profile. We can get a sense of how a group will behave, but we’re building it on impartial individual studies. It’s far more accurate.

Depending on what clients want to know, we can have a set of questions available to probe on the “why” of a study participant’s behavior. I have a lot of experience in both qualitative and quantitative research and Mike is extremely good at statistics.

M:  Eye tracking definitely has the strongest results when we combine the quantitative with the qualitative.

FR:  What’s the most interesting or surprising discovery you made in a study? 

M: I can’t think of one individual thing, but overall I really find it surprising how little people perceive what they do or don’t look at.  For example, with a typical web page, people are only looking at about 30% of what’s there. But, they’ll insist they’re looking at everything. We have the data that shows otherwise. This information really puts into question focus groups or interviews that rely on self-reporting.

B: I offer a different aspect of the same thing – people don’t really remember what they do. When I’m going through a task, the actual path I take isn’t that important to me. I’m going to leave things out of the story. Eye tracking fills in those gaps.

FR: Where do you think iTracking Research will be five years from now?

M: (laughing) It will be interesting to see how each of us answers this.

B: In five years, we should be a fairly substantial company. Our goal is to have gross revenues in the millions. We’re preparing to launch a new effort in Parkinson’s and neuropathy research, which we fully expect to take off.  We’ll also continue to grow the media research arm.

M: The tricky thing with this business is we aren’t like a bait shop. We don’t just order inventory and sell it. We’ve spent more time than I’ve expected on developing our theories and formulas and models and processes to get off the ground.

In five years, we’ll have two strong arcs: Neurodegenerative research – we plan to have a product out there that will detect and predict these diseases. And, we’ll have our media research.  We’ll be a mature company and will have established ourselves as strong leaders in this industry.

B: We’ve been very careful to take our time in putting together our intellectual property. We want to do things right.  We’re purposely doing a lot of our work quietly in this first year.

FR: Do you see any major changes on the horizon in the technology you use to complete your studies?

M: The technology is moving really fast.  At a recent conference, a company introduced an eye tracker that serves as a mouse. Instead of moving a computer mouse with your hand, you’re controlling everything with your eyes.

I see the industry splitting into two – research and consumer use like the mouse I just mentioned. In a few years, you’re going to have a choice of whether you want eye tracking with your new iPad or laptop or phone.

B: Regardless of the technology and whether it’s more available to the average person, you’re still going to need people who do what we do; people who develop the methodology, interpret all of the data and make the right conclusions. 

Bill and Mike have agreed to complete a study on the Far Reach site to see what we can learn. In the coming weeks, iTracking will implement our study. We’ll fill you in on the process and its findings once the study is complete.  We’re hoping this might be the start of a new partnership, with the opportunity to offer our clients even more value via our web design and development projects.

Stay tuned.