The latest online eye-tracking studies for dating sites confirmed all the stereotypes: Guys look at the pictures while women read the text. Find out more from the study and think about what this means for your marketing campaigns…
The new study, from user experience firm AnswerLab, shows that how users catch a potential date’s eye might depend on their gender.
Researchers used eye tracking technology to follow people’s eye movements as they perused online profiles.
The results show that men spend 65 percent more time looking at photos than women.
Women, on the other hand, spent 50 percent more time than men actually reading the profiles.
Women spent an average of 84 seconds looking at a profile to find out if the profile was to their liking, compared to 58 seconds for men.
The study also found that people tend to relate better to dating profiles that reflect how they would build their own. If a person would share a lot of personal information about themselves, they were more likely to search out the profiles that were very personal.
On the flip side of that, people who don’t like to share much about themselves went for the profiles that were just straight facts without much elaboration.
AnswerLab, a consumer research company, ran the study in one day at a coffee shop in San Francisco, Calif.
The study asked 39 patrons who identified themselves as interested in dating the opposite sex to take part in the study. Participants, 18 women and 21 men, looked at dating profiles from Match.com and eHarmony.com on a laptop.
The researchers collected data using the Tobii X1 Light Eye Tracker, a new, portable model of eye tracker. The device works by shining an infrared light at the eye, creating reflections which are, in turn, recorded by a camera.
Using the recorded pattern of reflections, the program calculates the angle between the cornea and pupil, which is used to calculate the angle of the gaze.
Combining the angle of the gaze and the distance between the eyes and the screen leads to accurate tracking of the eye’s movements.
http://answerlab.com/
