Don’t be too gun-shy. It is a powerful tool, but you just need to know how to interpret the results, and where it is different than human behavior. Give it a shot, and talk to Tim Ash, he is a great guy.

But seeing these results… auch not ready for the real world.

http://www.getfirefox.com

We’ve been researching human visual attention on websites for over a decade now – your tests actually mirror two of the most challenging mechanisms of neuroscientific attention prediction.

AttentionWizard’s failure on test 1 is in line with what our collaborators Ahissar and Hochstein have proposed as the “reverse hierarchy theory” of visual attention: complex features like shapes are often processed and perceived faster than simpler features like color. The original paper can be found here: http://atar.mscc.huji.ac.il/~ahissar/files/Merav&Shaul_TCS2004.pdf

Your second test might be even more important: position is a very powerful predictor of a user’s eye movements. Modeling effects like this is hard, but not impossible. However, you have to go beyond classical “saliency map” algorithms.

I’d like to point you to our EyeQuant technology, which does precisely that: http://www.eyequant.com

EyeQuant also predicts eye movements on websites, but achieves more than 90 % of an eye-tracking study’s predictive performance. This is only possible since EyeQuants attention model is based on actual eye-tracking studies with over 400 human subjects. I’d be glad to elaborate on any details of our evaluation and method.

We just launched our english web service and are currently offering free test accounts – if you’d like to give EyeQuant a try, feel free to get in touch.