AttentionWizard uses advanced software algorithms to simulate visual perception and attention. It is a combination of “bottom-up” visual system building blocks and “top-down” higher cognitive processes such as object recognition. Bottom-up features considered include: color differences, contrast , density, brightness and intensity, edges and intersections, length and width, curves and line orientations. Top-down algorithms recognize larger letters and text, skin texture, and human faces.

The eye gazing path is represented by the numbered path shown on the AttentionWizard heatmap. The eye gazing path starts with the number 1 and follows in chronological order. The eye gazing path depicts the path that your users eyes will take when they first get to your page. Depending on the image submitted (full page or above-the-fold) the eye gazing path can differ significantly.

The hot spots that can be found on your generated heatmap show areas of attention concentration. The greater the intensity of the hot spot, the more likely a user is to focus on that area of your page. Typically you would want these spots to be your call to action, logo, or any other areas of interest that you want your user to focus on. Depending on the image submitted (full page or above-the-fold) the hot spots can differ significantly.

AttentionWizard is a revolutionary approach to visualizing attention on a landing page.It can predict where the human eye will move during the first few seconds on a page, and where the brain’s attention will focus. No human subjects are required and it works with screen-grabs of actual pages or in-progress design mock-ups.

The AttentionWizard system takes a few moments to update. Any new account or password change will first be processed before they will be active.

Some people experiencing problems have found that waiting on the system before communicating AttentionWizard Support has been beneficial.

If after a few moments you try again to log in and still cannot gain access to your account we ask that you contact support. However, we do ask that you grant our system a few moments to process any changes before immediately contacting AttentionWizard Support.

An attention heatmap is a combination of two elements: eye-gazing, and predicted attention. Eye-gazing simulates the sequence of extremely rapid and involuntary eye movements (“saccades”) that happen as your eye scans a scene. This is overlaid on a heatmap of the attention represented by different colors which predicts where the brain will focus. Hotter areas indicate a more intense focus, while cooler areas show a lower level of awareness and importance.

AttentionWizard can be used to refine landing page designs for existing or new pages, and to improve conversion rates. It can identify which page elements are being looked at and which are being ignored. This allows the designer to focus attention on the correct parts of the page and increase the likelihood of conversion. Attention heatmaps can be created several times during the design or re-design process to ensure that the refinements are having the intended effect.

A “busy” eye-gaze path and scattered heatmap with many hotspots is usually an indication that visual priorities of the page are not clear, and will likely result in confusion and a higher bounce rate for your landing page. Relatively simple eye gaze paths and a small number of clear hot spots (centered on the desired conversion-related areas) are a good indication that the page will be more effective.

Please read the full CREDO Mobile case study about redesigning an email landing page recently featured on the SiteTuners blog.

Eye tracking and mouse tracking are much more time consuming, expensive, and take a long time to get results.

Eye tracking studies require human subjects to be recruited and to be shown the landing page in a controlled environment involving specialized hardware. Mouse tracking studies require adding special code to the landing page and waiting for many visitors to interact with it in order to produce aggregated “heatmaps” from multiple people.

AttentionWizard uses computer simulation and models to replace the need for human subjects interacting with your page. The results are available instantly and can be run on any uploaded image (a “live” page screenshot or a design mock-up of a new page).

AttentionWizard results are 75%+ correlated with eye tracking and mouse tracking approaches. The algorithm is optimized for fast computation. Slightly higher accuracy can be achieved by more compute-intensive algorithms, but these can take several hours to produce a result.

AttentionWizard heatmaps also tend to produce more focused hotspots because they are designed to simulate where the brain’s awareness is highest. By contrast, eye tracking and mouse tracking images tend to have more ghost-like halos that are simply the result of movements between the actual points of interest.

AttentionWizard is not a substitute for landing page testing. It can not evaluate the effectiveness of your sales copy, the strength of your brand or value proposition, the pricing of your product or service, the professionalism of your landing page design, or the Web visitor's psychological reactions to the specific color scheme you have chosen. But it can help you to improve the quality of your landing page, to make sure that the call-to-action is clear, and to make sure that other visual elements do not distract from the stated conversion goals.