Thanks Hawk for this chance for us to reach out to your UX community!
I’m going to describe what we do below, but I’ll be around to answer questions and respond to feedback so please do post replies to this topic. Of course you can contact me privately if you prefer.
So to start, my name is Dave Rawlinson, from a Melbourne startup called xLabs. We’re developing a webcam gaze-tracking service, and we’re currently offering full functionality at no charge to early adopters.
You can find it here:
http://eyesdecide.com
What’s it about? (I’ll try to keep it brief)
EyesDecide is a user-testing service aimed at UX and design professionals who want to quickly & easily discover how users look at visual media. It’s totally automatic, with results available immediately.
You need a laptop or desktop computer with a webcam, and some people to view your images - perhaps your colleagues, although a small panel is better. As this audience would probably know, testing a handful of people can often reveal unexpected behaviour or design issues.
Using EyesDecide you can replay individual viewer gaze tracks, or download and save reports such as heatmaps that you can offer to your clients as evidence to validate your designs. For example:
You can use EyesDecide as part of a more comprehensive testing service, either in your lab to complement existing hardware eye trackers, or you can reach out to participants at home.
So what do we want in return? In exchange for using EyesDecide, we would appreciate it if you could give us some feedback - the good and the bad. We need our target market to tell us how to improve. Happy to for you to post in this thread, or email us… it’s all useful for us.
In future we do plan to launch a paid service, but we have to get it right first! So we have decided that people who start using EyesDecide now will be able to continue using the service at no charge for at least 3 months (likely longer).
More information
EyesDecide uses xLabs’ webcam gaze tracking tech, which is delivered via a Chrome Browser Extension. You can do some fun stuff with the browser extension such as hands-free web browsing. More info here:
You can get the browser extension from the Chrome store (free):
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/d…hobondco?hl=en
You can interact with the browser extension using Javascript so those with web-dev skills can write some interesting gesture or expression based user interfaces…
Requirements
- You need to be sitting in a well-lit environment (e.g. facing a window during the day) to get a good picture from the camera
- Currently viewing needs Chrome browser. Rest of site works with any browser.
- I’m afraid it doesn’t work with glasses (yet)
- It doesn’t understand dual monitor setups (yet)
Please do contact me if you have any questions! We would love to show you how to use the service and tell you more about what we do. We’re also happy to come and demo to users in Australia.
Sincerely,
Dave Rawlinson