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SUMMARY
DEFINITIONS
INTRODUCTION
METHODS
RESULTS
ADDENDUM
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Greg, CEO & Founder
Eyetools, Inc. |
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Methods:
Participants
One hundred participants from the San Francisco Bay Area took part in this study, 42 men and 58 women. Participants ranged in age from 20 to 55 (mean age of 32.8), and had previous experience conducting internet searches using the Google search engine. All participants were naive to the goals of this study. Participants had normal or corrected to normal vision.
Apparatus
The experiment was conducted using a Tobii 1750 monitor with IR cameras build into the monitor itself. No head mounted hardware was used. Raw eye position and page data was recorded and analyzed using Eyetools, Inc. in-house software. All web pages were displayed in Internet Explorer 6.0 at a resolution of 1024x768.
Stimulus
For the purpose of this study, screen shots of live Google pages were used to create prototype search results. The pages were image mapped to accurately simulate live listings. In each listings page, a single Google Checkout button either did not appear on the page or was placed in the right hand rail at ad position 1, 3, or 5 from the top of the page (Figure 1).
All pages appeared and behaved like live Google results. All top header links to other services such as News and Gmail, and search boxes were fully functional. After completing the study, subjects responded that they had been unaware that the pages were not live Google results.
Procedure
Each participant conducted 12 product search tasks. At the beginning of each task, participants read a set of instructions which included a short priming paragraph and search instructions. For example, the “Gold Jewelry” task included the following instruction set:
Imagine that your mother's birthday is fast approaching. This year, you and your siblings would like to get her something very special -- maybe a Mother's Ring or some gold earrings. In this task, please take a moment to look into some possible gift ideas.
Please search the term: Gold Jewelry
Use the search term above, and follow any links of interest to you.
All instruction sets were based on actual internet searches conducted in the past by Eyetools employees. A complete discussion guide for this study is available upon request.
Participants were allowed as much time as they needed to search each product term to their satisfaction. The time allotted to complete all 12 searches was 1 hour.
In a single session, each participant was asked to search 12 of the following key words:
- Fishing Pole
- Football Cleats
- Golf Shoes
- Jerseys
- Charm Bracelets
- Gold Jewelry
- Wedding Bands
- Pink Sapphire Jewelry
- Canon
- Cybershot
- Zoom Lens
- Nikon
- Auctions
- Online Auction
- Portable DVD Players
- Sony Desktop
Task presentation was randomized for each participant. No single button position was displayed more than 3 times in any individual test session.
Analysis
Changes in viewing of right rail advertisements were analyzed using Friedman's nonparametric ANOVA test with an alpha level of 0.05. Measurements were considered statistically significant if the p value was less than or equal to 0.05. We used non-parametric testing in order to avoid making broad assumptions about individual learned behavior and search habits.
In an effort to double check our results, we used bootstrapping and t-test methodologies to re-analyze the data. These parametric tests did not reveal results different to the non-parametric analysis. Because the non-parametric methodologies make fewer assumptions about user behavior, all p values presented in this report are those produced by the Friedman test.
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