Eye Tracking: What Is it and What Is it Used for?

Would you like to enhance the user experience on your websites or apps to increase conversions? If so, it’s time to discover the power of eye tracking and how it can revolutionize your interface design.

If you’ve spent any time in the digital world, you’ve probably come across a heatmap of a website, showing the areas where users pay the most attention while browsing. Well, eye tracking is the technology behind those images, enabling developers and designers to better understand user behavior when interacting with a visual interface.

If you want to learn how this technology can transform your approach and improve your results, keep reading this article. We’ll explain everything you need to know, including how it connects with identity verification and the innovative solutions Silt offers in this field.

What is Eye Tracking?

Eye tracking is like having a detective that follows every movement of your eyes. Using specialized devices, this technology can precisely track where you’re looking on a screen and how long you focus on each specific area.

Imagine researchers could see your eyes while you explore an ad on the Internet. With eye tracking, they can accurately identify which parts of the ad catch your attention first and how long you stay focused on them. This provides invaluable information for designers and marketers, allowing them to create more effective advertisements and design interfaces that truly connect with users, making interactions more intuitive and seamless.

In short, eye tracking is the key tool for understanding how users interact with visual content, resulting in digital experiences that are not only more engaging but also drive higher conversions.

How Does Eye Tracking Work?

This research can be conducted in various ways, depending on the study’s objectives and environment.

There are three main types of devices used for eye-tracking studies:

👁️​ Screen-mounted eye-tracking devices: These are placed on a computer monitor to follow eye movements as the user browses a website or interacts with an app.

👁️​ Eye-tracking glasses: Ideal for real-time studies in physical environments, such as retail stores. These glasses capture exactly what a person is looking at while moving through a space, providing precise data on areas of interest.

👁️​ Webcam-based eye tracking: A more accessible solution, especially useful for studies on e-commerce platforms. It allows tracking of where users’ eyes focus as they navigate a website, without needing additional equipment.

The choice of technology depends on the type of research you want to conduct. For example, a company wanting to analyze customer behavior in a physical store might opt for eye-tracking glasses to obtain real-time data. On the other hand, an online retailer might prefer a fixed eye tracker or a webcam to analyze how users interact with their website.

However, to maximize the value of the data obtained with eye tracking, a clear methodology is crucial. Before starting any study, it’s important to define the questions you want to answer. For instance, if you’re conducting a study on your e-commerce site, you might want to know which page elements attract the most attention or at what points users tend to leave the site.

With the right combination of technology and methodology, eye tracking can offer valuable insights to improve both physical and digital environments, optimizing user experience and increasing conversions.

Eye Tracking: What Is It Used For?

Eye movements are like a window into the human mind. Our eyes reveal what intrigues us, what we like, and even our decisions. For example, when something interests us or provokes an intense emotional response, our pupils dilate.

These details, captured during an eye-tracking study, allow researchers to more accurately predict how an audience will react to certain stimuli. For businesses, applying this knowledge to user experience (UX) and user interface (UI) design can be a game-changer. By understanding what captures users’ attention, it’s possible to create more engaging websites and content that are not only easy to use but also generate higher conversions.

Additionally, eye tracking allows for precise identification of attention patterns. Think of a popular meme where the text guides the viewer’s eyes in a specific order. Most people will read it following that pattern without realizing it. If eye tracking had been used while viewing that meme, researchers could have recorded the exact order in which the phrases were read.

By observing this pattern across multiple users, common areas of interest can be identified, allowing web pages to be designed in a way that optimizes attention on key points.

Eye Tracking and Identity Verification: How Are They Connected?

Eye tracking is not only useful for improving user experience and optimizing interfaces but also plays a crucial role in identity verification, especially in liveness detection. At Silt, we utilize advanced liveness detection techniques, both passive and active, and the precision of eye tracking can be a key complementary tool in this process.

In our active liveness detection, for example, we ask the user to turn their head to one side, allowing us to verify depth and ensure we are dealing with a real person and not a flat image or a paper printout. This is where eye tracking can be particularly useful.

By tracking eye movements during this process, we can ensure that the user’s eyes behave naturally and are not static as they would be in a photograph or manipulated video.

Additionally, our texture detection systems, which differentiate between real documents or faces and forgeries, can benefit from eye tracking to detect any anomalies in visual behavior that might indicate an attempt at fraud.

🚫​ For example, if a user tries to deceive the system with an image instead of a real face, the detected eye movement patterns might not match those expected in an authentic interaction.

So, eye tracking can complement our liveness detection by providing an additional layer of security, ensuring that users are who they claim to be. This not only strengthens authenticity in identity verification but also better protects businesses and users against potential fraud.

At Silt, we are committed to innovation and the use of advanced technologies to ensure maximum security in identity verification. If you need reliable KYB and KYC solutions, we invite you to try our free demo. Discover how we can help you protect your business with our market-leading verification tools.