All About Eye Tracking

In this episode of The Consumer Insights Podcast, we speak with Mike Bartels, Senior Director of Enterprise Research at Tobii.

You can access all episodes of the Consumer Insights Podcast on Apple, Spotify, Google, or use the RSS feed with your favorite player. Below, you'll find a lightly edited transcript of this episode.

Thor: Hello, everyone, and welcome to the Consumer Insights Podcast. Today, I'm excited to have a truly inspiring insights leader joining me for what I know will be a fascinating conversation. 

Michael Bartels is the Senior Director of Enterprise Research at Tobii, a global leader in eye-tracking solutions and services to study human behavior. Prior to his roles at Tobii, Michael was a Senior Project Manager at the eye-tracking solutions provider EyeTracking and received his master's in experimental psychology from San Diego State University. Thank you so much for joining me today, Michael.

Mike Bartels: Thank you so much for having me. Glad to be here.

Thor: Firstly, could you take a couple of minutes to tell us about yourself, your company, and how you got to where you are today? I notice that you have a few different titles on LinkedIn. I take it you're wearing a few different hats at Tobii.

Mike: I am. We all wear many hats at Tobii. My journey in the eye-tracking industry began roughly 15 years ago while I was getting my master's at San Diego State. Like many graduate students, I was looking for a little extra cash, so I started interning. 

One of my professor's companies is called EyeTracking, Inc. I had no idea what eye tracking was, no idea this technology existed. As soon as I saw it, I was hooked. I knew this was something I wanted to be involved in.

After I graduated, I started as a data collector and researcher there, moved up to a senior researcher. A few years later, I moved over to Tobii, the global leader in eye tracking, and have slowly but surely gone from insights research to director of our enterprise team over there. 

It's been a whirlwind journey over the last 15 years or so. I've got to see all different sides of this business, all different use cases for this technology, and am really happy to have been involved in it.

Mike's definition of an insight

Thor: Tell me, having spent 15 years in the industry, I'm sure you have an opinion on the definition of an insight. How would you as an insights leader define an insight?

Mike: Yes, that's a really good question. I would first say what an insight is not. An insight is not data. It's not a report. It's not results. An insight is the intersection between those results and some business impact. It's that ‘aha’ moment where you suddenly understand something about your consumers or your customers that wasn't clear to you in the past.

An insight is the intersection between those results and some business impact. It's that ‘aha’ moment where you suddenly understand something about your consumers or your customers that wasn't clear to you in the past.

In the course of our work, we see this from all different sources. We see this coming out of interviews. We see this coming out of surveys. We see this coming out of biometric data. Of course, the place we most like to see it come out of is from the eye-tracking data. Giving brands the opportunity to literally see through the eyes of their customers is really conducive to drawing out those insights.

Because often what we'll hear in surveys and what we'll hear in interviews has a filter on it, the social desirability filter that consumers tend to have where they tend to simplify things or want to sound like a cheerleader for whatever brand they're testing, but the eyes don't lie. When you're able to see through that person's eyes, the insights can be very, very clear and very concise.

On the importance of insights and eye tracking

Thor: In your view, talking about these ‘aha’ moments, what is it that makes market and consumer insights so important and, in particular, the types of insights gained from eye tracking?

Mike: I think one of the things that happens a lot with brands, whether you're creating a website or creating a package design or designing a retail store, is you can get into this bubble. 

Let's take an e-commerce platform for example. You're working on this every day. You and your team know it inside and out. To you, it is the perfectly functioning creature of UX, but your consumers don't live in that world. They don't live in that bubble. They haven't had all these same experiences and had hundreds of hours playing around with it to get to know how it works.

Eye tracking in particular is a great tool for this because there really isn't a better way to experience your product along with your consumer than through their eyes. You get to see where they get hung up, what they miss, what they pay attention to. What are the things that they struggle with? What are the things that really delight them and they tend to focus on for longer periods of time? 

Often what we find is that the people who design packages and platforms and retail experiences are in the dark about how things are actually going to be experienced in the real world. That's why it's so important to do research. That's why it's so important to draw out these insights from your actual consumers. 

Eye tracking in particular is a great tool for this because there really isn't a better way to experience your product along with your consumer than through their eyes. You get to see where they get hung up, what they miss, what they pay attention to. What are the things that they struggle with? What are the things that really delight them and they tend to focus on for longer periods of time? 

Pairing that with other research methodologies does get you out of that bubble and get you into this view where you can uncover some of these insights that would've been hidden otherwise.

The power of research that quantifies what you know to be true

Thor: I'd like to maybe talk about a comment you made recently on LinkedIn about the power of research that, I quote, "quantifies the things we already think know to be true," rather than offering new and counterintuitive insight. Could you elaborate more on this? Could you also tell us a bit more about the study behind it?

Mike: Absolutely. To your first question, I think there is a bias toward research that blows our minds and is counterintuitive, and is something that you never would've expected, but the truth is that is a very small percentage of the actual research that is done. 

Most of the consumer insights research that's done is confirmatory research of a hypothesis that you already have or something that you already suspect or just kind of foundational research where perhaps there isn't a hypothesis, but you really just want to understand a consumer better.

It doesn't have this big light bulb that goes off and this mind-blowing effect, but it is very important. We do need to confirm those things that we think to be true and make sure that they're scientifically valid. We also need to put numbers behind those hypotheses. 

It doesn't have this big light bulb that goes off and this mind-blowing effect, but it is very important. We do need to confirm those things that we think to be true and make sure that they're scientifically valid. We also need to put numbers behind those hypotheses. 

Let's take this specific study for example. One of the hypotheses in the study was if we place ads in the context of the ad, it's going to be more likely to capture and hold attention.

For example, if you are selling a smartphone, put it on TechCrunch or some techy website rather than Better Homes and Gardens, and it's more likely to be seen, noticed, and remembered. That's intuitive, right? That's not mind-blowing, but running this study, throwing these web pages out to a few hundred consumers, tracking their eye movements as they view the page allows us to say exactly what that difference is.

People seeing these ads 80% faster when they're in a context versus out of context, or spending three more seconds on average looking at these ads, or being four times more likely to recall these ads. Those types of numbers give a magnitude to the effect that we see. You're able to understand just how big a difference this makes and just how big a priority it should be for your company to put these ads in context.

How eye tracking complements other research methods

Thor: That's super interesting. To your point about actually understanding the magnitude of whatever we might already have suspected, I think, also has enormous value. If we talk a bit about Tobii's eye-tracking tools, you measure customer attention for actionable insights. In your opinion, how does this method stack up against other consumer research methodologies?

Mike: Good question. First of all, I wouldn't put it in a stack against other methodologies necessarily. 

We tend to think of eye tracking as a complementary methodology for whatever else you might be doing. We always recommend that it's used alongside qualitative methods, other types of biofeedback methods, and other types of big data. Whatever you're already using, eye tracking can be an enhancement to that or give you another data stream that's giving you a different-look consumer behavior than anything else.

There's really no way for a consumer to mislead you with where their eyes are looking. You're seeing their natural experience and able to draw insights from it. That objectivity is a big piece of it. 

In terms of how it compares, some of the advantages are objectivity. This is the number one advantage. You're recording exactly where someone's eyes are pointed in real time and seeing that data unfiltered. 

There's really no way for a consumer to mislead you with where their eyes are looking. You're seeing their natural experience and able to draw insights from it. That objectivity is a big piece of it. 

Another thing that happened in recent years is that it's become very unobtrusive. When I started doing this 15 years ago, you'd wear this giant headset with these big cameras under your eyes and it was kind of tight. Calibration was arduous. It felt like you were in some kind of a medieval torture device. 

Those days are long gone. We're able to do eye tracking with the webcam on your computer in the comfort of your own home if you choose to participate in one of those studies. I also have the newest, latest, greatest wearable system here.

Thor: Wow. Looks like a regular pair of glasses.

Mike: Just a regular pair of glasses. It has tiny cameras and illuminators built into the lenses. 

Thor: Very cool.

Mike: It creates an extremely natural experience and allows you to get quite objective data on types of behaviors that otherwise you can't see.

Fueling innovation through insights

Thor: That's so interesting. To have gone through that evolution from those medieval devices to where you are now is a journey of itself. I imagine that with machine learning that you also were able to accelerate the type of analysis you could do off of the data that you collect.

If we spend a bit more time talking about your career and your experience integrating insights, could you tell us and maybe give us an example of when you've been able to integrate insights to fuel some level of innovation? I can be improving a campaign or a project or a product, and maybe walk us through the different steps. 

What were the insights that created the opportunity? What was the insight you identified? Which team found it? How were you able to use it to get to some form of end result?

Mike: Yes, absolutely. I would say 60% of the work that we do is in shopper research, understanding how people work in retail environments when they're filling up their cart, trying to decide what they're going to make for dinner and feed their kids, and all those important decisions. Typically, what happens is Tobii offers two different types of solutions. We do offer the hardware and software.

Brands that want to take this in-house and do their own research can get their own eye-tracking system and software. We also offer services through our insight team. I think that's more where your question is focused and I'll kind of stick with that angle. 

A typical study, a brand would come to us and say, "Hey, we're very interested in understanding this particular aspect of the consumer experience. We'd like to be a fly on the wall, see through their eyes as they're doing this shopper journey."

The things that we're interested in are, where should we put promotional signage? Where should we put our products on the shelf? How does our planogram perform compared with our competitors? Are we missing any opportunities where we could put products that are high-attention, high-value real estate in terms of where people are looking? 

Our typical study might be somewhere between 50 and 500 consumers, who would be recruited to go shop in a store. They would wear these glasses while they're doing that. The instructions are very low-touch. We don't want to give them a list of things to do. We want to sit there and observe natural behavior. 

It's pretty much, "Put on these glasses. Go shopping as you normally would. Come find me when you're finished." That way, we're not interrupting them. We're not asking them questions along the way. We're not making them second-guess their decisions. 

They often forget they're wearing the glasses a few minutes into the shop. I know this because I've had to chase people into the parking lot to get them back before because they forgot that they were wearing them. 

The kinds of insights, I can give you a few examples that are public and we can share from a study like this. One of our clients was interested in understanding whether or not they should tag along with attention that's going to upper navigation in a retail store.

We were able to say, "That's not really a great piece of visual real estate. You're much better off putting things at shelf level that come out perpendicular to the shelf." 

As people are navigating, they're looking to see what items are in the aisle. Maybe there should be a promotional sign for their products on those signs as well. What we found was only around 10% of the people in the study were actually looking at that signage. They identify which aisle to go down by looking at the products in the aisle, not looking up at the signage in most cases, especially in familiar stores.

We were able to say, "That's not really a great piece of visual real estate. You're much better off putting things at shelf level that come out perpendicular to the shelf." 

That's where people's attention tends to be focused. They're lasered in on finding the products in this chaotic mess of the shelf. We are also able to sort of dispel some myths about putting products at eye level. Namely, if you want something to be seen, it should be at eye level on the shelf.

If you actually look at eye-tracking data while somebody's walking down an aisle, what you see is that their eyes are kind of oriented down instead of being oriented at eye level. If you have a new product that you're trying to get noticed, it's actually going to get more attention if it's slightly below eye level where people are actually focusing. Those are some of the kinds of insights. 

I could literally go on all day, but does that answer your question about what a study like that would look like?

Thor: Definitely. I hope I get to have dinner with you sometime because I'm sure you'll be able to share even more of those good insights.

Mike: It'll be a super fun dinner.

How the field of eye tracking has evolved

Thor: Tell me, with over 15 years of experience in eye tracking, how have you seen the field evolve, and especially when it comes to studying consumer behavior?

Mike: I would say in the early days, eye tracking was known as a tool for getting a heat map. A heat map is this graphic. That's an intense plot of attention. There are hotspots where people look and there are cold spots where people don't look. 

It's a useful visualization, but it came to define the entire methodology and technology in a way that was very limiting. In the year since, we've seen eye tracking become much more a part of understanding the qualitative experience.

It's become much more of a dynamic methodology. It's become much more closely tied to the follow-up interview.

Yes, it's about this aggregate view of where attention is focused. Perhaps even more importantly, it's about seeing through the consumers' eyes watching those videos, being able to experience that consumer journey with them, and pull out insights from what they look at, what they miss, where they focus, and all those kinds of things. 

It's become much more of a dynamic methodology. It's become much more closely tied to the follow-up interview. In many cases, we'll do something called a "retrospective think-aloud," where somebody will go shop in a store or use a website. 

Then instead of asking them questions and interrupting them during that process, we'll play back the eye-tracking video afterwards and say, "Could you just talk me through your experience? Tell me why you looked here, why you pick this up, why you laughed at this point when you were reading the back of the package."

It's really a useful cue for the consumer to be able to see their eye movements and relive that experience, and then talk through everything that happened. In a way, that's much richer than a traditional follow-up interview. 

That's been a major change is just that shift from, "Hey, this is just kind of a quantitative visual tool," to "This is something that allows us to really capture that experience live and integrate it into our qualitative findings as well." The other thing that's changed is that people have actually heard of it.

When I started and I would tell people what I did for a living, there was a very long pause, and then they would change the subject because it was just really confusing. 

Now, it's really out there. I think it's more than just the research. Tobii's working to put eye-tracking systems and automobiles to make driver safety safer, putting eye-trackers into VR headsets for gaming. There are just a ton of different applications now for this technology. When I mentioned what I do now, the eyes don't glaze over and people sometimes even have a follow-up question. That's nice to see as well.

The essential tools for insights professionals

Thor: Having been in the industry for so long and telling us a bit about the cutting edge of what you're now able to do with eye tracking, what tools do you believe are essential to support insight professionals and why?

Mike: I think I would say more than anything else, there are so many tools out there right now. It's always good for brands to use a wide breadth of tools in their research, making sure they're getting quantitative data, qualitative data, big data, thick data, small data, all the data types to really paint a full picture of what's happening. 

I would say part of the challenge is being able to organize all of that and communicate all of that within an organization. Also, with as quickly as people tend to move on to new opportunities these days, nobody stays at a company as long as I've stayed at this company, for example.

There's a lot of loss of institutional knowledge that happens because there are so many people transitioning out and transitioning in. I think a company needs a way to organize all this information, onboard new people with these kinds of insights, and just make sure that there's a strong continuity in that organization with the research.

There's a lot of loss of institutional knowledge that happens because there are so many people transitioning out and transitioning in. I think a company needs a way to organize all this information, onboard new people with these kinds of insights, and just make sure that there's a strong continuity in that organization with the research. I could list 25 different qualitative, quantitative, and otherwise tools that can be used. 

For me, the biggest challenge that I see for a lot of companies is just keeping it all straight, keeping it all together, making sure information gets dispersed down among the team. That's something that's very important.

Thor: Mike, you don't need to convince me about the importance of centralizing and democratizing access to data. [laughs]

Mike: Of course.

The DNA of a successful insights team

Thor: Tell me a bit about the teams themselves. What do you believe is the DNA of a successful insights team? What do we need to think about?

Mike: I would say number one is curiosity. You need to really care about your product and want to understand how consumers are using it. Another one I would say, I think there's a saying in literature and writing that you have to be able to kill your darlings, which means you'll have some beautiful sentences you've written. If it doesn't work, you can't be afraid to just get rid of it and start over.

If it doesn't work, you can't be afraid to just get rid of it and start over.

That's also true in the world of marketing and marketing research and package design in UX. Sometimes you have some great idea and it just doesn't work out in the world. Consumers just don't get it. They don't like it. They don't want it. You have to be willing to cut it and change to something that works instead of being married to ideas that the research doesn't support.

Those are a couple of things that I think are important. Also, just different perspectives. You don't want to have all people who came from the same background and went to the same university and read the same books designing your site. You want a lot of different perspectives, a lot of different viewpoints. I think on an insight team, in particular, having a diversity of the team is more important than in a lot of other roles.

Transitioning from academia to the world of market and UX research

Thor: You also have experience with academic research as well from your master's in experimental psychology. From your perspective, how has working with market and UX research compared to the world of academic research, and what were the different skills you needed to develop? What advice would you give some of our listeners starting out on a similar path?

Mike: I think it's really just a totally different mindset in the world of academic research. You want to be as detailed as possible. You want to have 30 sources supporting your findings. You want to make sure everything is scientifically unimpeachable, which is really important and really great in academic and scientific research. 

Coming over to the world of marketing research, I had to turn off that part of my brain a little bit because it's important to be scientifically valid and ethical for your conclusions to hold water, but you also need to understand that your audience needs to get to the point quickly.

They're going to need to share this around to people in their organization who aren't going to be able to listen to you prattle on for an hour about all of the details. Making things concise to the point, easy to understand, digestible, working in a short PowerPoint presentation instead of a 20-page journal article, it's a different skill set. 

In many ways, it's more challenging to capture complex information and communicate it in a very simple way, which is what has to happen in the world of marketing research.

Opportunities for insights professionals to challenge the status quo

Thor: That's super interesting. What opportunities do you think there are for insights professionals to build on what you just said, make true business impact that also challenges the status quo?

Mike: I think part of it depends on how seriously an organization takes consumer insights. We've worked with a lot of brands that will run the research study, but the changes that are recommended aren't necessarily taken seriously or implemented. 

We've worked with other organizations that it's really in their DNA that they take research seriously. They take the voice of their customers seriously. If the research is done right and done well and done in a way that has a business impact, you're going to see that business impact. You're going to see those changes made.

Part of it, I think, is structural. If you're working for a company or a brand that takes consumer insights very seriously, you're probably not going to have a lot of pushing to do to get your ideas implemented. Whereas in the other scenario, it can be more difficult. 

I would say having a team that is serious, objective, diverse, and having an organization that is willing to put them in a game where they have an opportunity to score, that's really the key to making an impact with those insights.

Challenges facing insights professionals in the near future

Thor: On the flip side, however, what challenges do you see that could face insights professionals and the wider industry in the near future?

Mike: There's a lot of challenges out there. There's a lot happening with automation, big data. Everything's going online. You have a lot of insight professionals with the particular skill set of doing focus groups, meeting people in person, and those sorts of things aren't happening as much anymore. I feel like you have to be a jack-of-all-trades to be an insight professional these days.

You need to understand the qualitative side of things and how to run a focus group in an interview. You also need to understand big data and Google Analytics. You also need to understand how to develop an online survey with all sorts of crazy logic. 

It's a lot more of a methodologically-diverse industry, I would say, than it has been in the past. That can be very challenging. Also, they need to learn the new tools and techniques and technologies in real-time as the industry rapidly changes.

Another challenge I would say is just challenges in the world. Things were already moving online in terms of the way consumers consume, and then COVID happened and it just rapidly accelerated. The in-store retail experience is still very important. Now, pretty much whatever company you work for, you also have to have a UX component and understand the online experience. That also represents a new challenge.

Who Mike would love to lunch with in the world of insights

Thor: A big challenge for me at the moment is that we've come towards the end of our conversation, Mike. I've enjoyed this so much. I have one last question for you, which is very much centered on inspiration and also appreciation, which I'd like for you to tell me. Who in the world of customer insights would you love to have lunch with?

Mike: Can I say you?

Thor: I was caught. I did not anticipate this one. I was hoping for dinner, but lunch would definitely be great. Sounds like a plan.

Mike: Gee, that's a tough one. Off the top of my head, there are so many people on it. It's such an incredible field of researchers on both the brand side and the agency side who have so many great ideas. I don't know if I could pick just one. I'm going to go with the answer, my gracious host on this podcast. Let's have lunch.

Summary

Thor: Let's do lunch, Mike. I look forward to it and we'll definitely find time. We have a lot of stuff to discuss. I have a bunch of questions I want to ask you that did not make the podcast, so I look forward to that. 

This has been such an enlightening conversation, Mike. It's been fantastic to hear about really the cutting-edge approach that you guys are pursuing and innovating with at Tobii. I think that there are a lot of things you said that were really powerful.

Just a reminder for us that, guess what, the world in which you live many times being very knowledgeable about your product and the way you market it is not the world in which your consumer lives. You need to be able to kill your darlings. 

Although insights are about ‘aha’ moments, the importance of also having an understanding of the magnitude of things we already know or think to be true is super interesting and powerful. I think a lot of us should take that advice. Mike, I'd like to thank you for joining me today. I know that I have and the listeners have learned a great deal from talking to you today, so thank you so much.

Mike: Thank you so much. It's been a pleasure.