The NextStage CRO demonstrates how website visitors will take a marketer's desired action when guided by animated eyes showing them the way.
Dr. John Robinson, chief road safety engineer for Delphi-MRC, was one of NextStage's first supporters. He quickly understood how our technology could help in different internet business models, took part in our early research and development, promoted us to other businesses and provided the name of my next book, "Reading Virtual Minds."
I sometimes reference Dr. Robinson's work in my research because our worlds often overlap. One such overlap involved hindsight bias. Our worlds overlapped again when NextStage began researching the use of mirror neurons in website navigation. I've written about mirror neurons in "Shared Traits of Great Web Design" and in the NextStage whitepaper "Learning to Listen, Learning to See."
Mirror neurons are what cause person A to mimic the motions or actions of person B without person A realizing they're doing so. In the great John Ford classic "The Quiet Man," Ward Bond's Father Peter Lonergan bobs, weaves and throws punches while watching John Wayne's Sean Thornton duke it out with Victor McLaglen's Squire "Red" Will Danaher. That is mirror neurons working at their best. Another excellent example is seeing someone dance and starting to move yourself. Other examples include babies mimicking the motions of their mothers, wu shu training... . The literature is replete with examples of mirror neurons and how they're used to teach us to do things people want us to do...
... like clicking on a web link.
From streets to style sheets
The Florida Dept of Transportation and several others have published studies on the use of animated eyes as an aid to traffic and pedestrian safety. At crosswalks, above the "Walk/Don't Walk" sign, a pair of animated eyes reduces fatalities because walkers follow the animated eyes' gaze and look for oncoming traffic. Another street-wise use of animated eyes is at the exits to public garages. A pair of animated eyes at the exit stop sign reduces accidents because drivers follow the eyes' gaze to look both ways before exiting the garage into traffic.
But the use of eye images doesn't stop there. Bateson, Nettle and Roberts report in the September 22 edition of Biology Letters on the use of non-animated images of eyes as a way to police social settings. It seems that people behave differently -- are indeed more willing to conform to some indeterminate social standard -- if they suspect they're being watched.
So a little over a year ago, during a conversation with Dr. Robinson and some others about getting people to look where you want them to and do what you want them to, I formed an experiment. The timing was excellent. NextStage had just finished a long study on getting site visitors to follow desired action paths. I discussed those findings in "What Comes Next?" Getting visitors to look where you want them to is something I've also written about often ("Directing Your Customer's Gaze" is a good example). This research involved combining these two elements:
- Getting people to look in a desired direction and
- Perform a desired action.
Let me take you through the experiment.
Look into my eyes
We enlisted a few of our research partners to place a non-animated image of eyes on their home page (something I know isn't appropriate for all sites out there). The goal was to learn if a simple set of eyes would change online behavior and if so, how.
Figure 1
The image used is shown in Figure 1 (different sized figures were used in the research. Figures shown here are for example purposes only). The results were definite and undeniable: Time on page dropped by almost half. Navigation became erratic, what might be called "anxious." The results echoed the Biology Letters paper referenced above-- people acted differently when they felt they were being watched. As one person explained, "...eyes on a page creeps me out a little."
The pair of eyes was moved to different pages. Browsing behavior changed each time the eyes were shown. We performed some modified A/B testing to determine which navigation types were most affected by the image. The results were expected and still exciting to learn; highly visual people, especially those who tend to frame things in the negative and make decisions based on past experience, didn't like being watched. We also noticed that the size of the image affected navigation inversely.
Next: Response when you animate the eyes.