You’ve normally got two choices in site heatmapping (figuring out where eyeballs land on your site), you can either buy costly specialized equipment ($40K) or pay a consultant to use their own equipment, which costs upwards of $5K. Y Combinator funded GazeHawk has figured out a more pared down and innovative solution; Why not use webcams?
Co-founded by Brian Krausz and Joe Gershenson, newly launched GazeHawk is less expensive than most already existing eyetracking services at 1/10 the price. And heatmapping, something that required custom hardware and bringing people into a lab, now requires simple consumer hardware and proprietary software.
GazeHawk has its own network of test subjects; All you need to do as a website owner is give them a url or a screenshot and you get back a site map of the most active viewed places on your website, instead of having to got through the unwieldly and costly processes described above.
Though similar in concept to UserTesting, GazeHawk is disruptive in the sense that we’ve never seen a low-cost, low-effort eye tracking service before. According to Krausz, GazeHawk’s future plans include a number of extra features, better visualizations, allowing people to use their own test viewers, and eventually expansion in to the UX industry — Creating product based on tester feedback, i.e. what people want to see.
Weary readers have learned to ignore ads, especially those placed in the bottom right corner. Say Krausz, “People are so good about identifying ads nowadays that if anything looks like one you lose the entire area.” Below is a GazeHawk heatmap of our homepage — most notably people are looking at our story rotator, ING ads and not our events stuff. So quick look to the bottom right! Look!
Aside from being fascinating, accurate heatmapping is crucial to informing online ad placement, cost per click and cost per impression are just not as accurate when measuring brand conveyance. For those interested in trying it out, GazeHawk is offering a 50% discount for TC readers, just enter TECHCRUNCH10 at checkout.
GazeHawk is a Y Combinator-funded company that provides eye tracking services using ordinary webcams. Their community of testers engage in eye-tracking studies from the comfort of home, allowing GazeHawk to offer professional eye tracking studies at a much lower price. GazeHawk pays a number of participants to view a customer’s page, and tracks those participants’ gazes via webcam. Customers then get heatmaps which show how the users interacted with the site. GazeHawk is the first company to offer eye tracking...
Y Combinator is a venture fund which focuses on seed investments to startup companies. It offers financing as well as business consulting along with other opportunities to 2-4 person companies looking to take an idea to a product. Y Combinator looks for companies with “good” ideas over companies with experience and a business model. The company made its first investments in Summer 2005. Y Combinator selects companies to finance and consult with twice a year. They are located in...
Seattle, WA
San Diego, CA
Menlo Park, CA
Boston, MA
Berlin, Germany
San Francisco
