Direct-hit user brain--a new approach to user research (eye Movement & Brain Electrical Research)

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The eye-moving instrument is popular as a user research tool that records the user's gaze trajectory. With the rise of neural marketing, EEG research is more and more used to understand the user's real ideas. The combination of eye movement research and EEG research is a trend of future user research. With the help of the two online synchronization, we can get more accurate, in-depth and comprehensive user information parallel to the subjective report.

In the process of user research, one of the puzzles of engineers is: What users say is always vague and uncertain, susceptible to a variety of factors-users will say 100 reasons to like your product, but a reason that does not like it can motivate him to leave, how to understand the user's real ideas become a problem. With the popularization of eye-moving instruments, the commercialization of EEG research, the ideal of user research engineers has become a reality: now more and more objectively and truly understand the user's view.

What is eye movement research?

Eye movement research is to record the trajectory of the eyes of the user in the course of performing specific tasks with the help of eye movements to analyze the user's cognitive and psychological activities. Through the eye movement data, we can analyze the user's gaze rule to evaluate and optimize our product design. Eye movement research in the entire user research location as shown in the following figure, visible eye movement research based on the user's actual operation, the website, product layout to do qualitative analysis, to get the conclusion of the design reasonable or not.

We usually use a hot map (heat map) to indicate the gaze of the interface (pictured below). The redder areas indicate a longer gaze, a green area, a shorter surface gaze, and, of course, a white area where users do not see it.

How to analyze eye movement data?

Eye movement Research can provide a set of eye movement indicators, eye movements can fully record the user's gaze trajectory, can basically solve the user "How to see" "what" problem. Typical and commonly used indicators include:

1, the total number of attention: is considered to be linked to search performance indicators.

2. Average gaze dwell time: reflects the difficulty of extracting information.

3. The gaze point sequence (gaze trajectory): the conversion between the gaze point and the interest area can measure the rationality of the user interface layout. Reasonable interface layout should be orderly, smooth and logical in the gaze trajectory.

4, the first time to reach the target area of interest/gaze point: The first time to reach the target area when the area is searched for a specific target. It is also an important index for the reasonable measurement of user interface layout.

5. Gaze time for each area of interest: the time of the subjects ' eyes to gaze at a particular display element (the designer's area of interest).

However, because the eye movement data itself reflects the behavior, it cannot directly reflect the cognitive and thinking process. Behavior is a comprehensive result of various brain activities, so the reference meaning of the data itself is not single and difficult to explain. Eye movement research needs good experimental design coordination to correctly explain eye movement data, or need to cooperate with interview or retrospective test to reflect cognitive and thinking process. EEG research makes up for the defect of eye movement research, and the combination of natural and eye movement, this combination can not only correctly interpret the eye movement data, but also objectively and accurately reflect the user's psychological process.

What is brain electrical research?

EEG (EEG) is a large number of neural tissue in the brain after synaptic potential synchronization sum, contains a lot of psychological information, with different waveform reflected, the common waveform as shown in the following figure.

Different waveforms represent different psychological information, such as alpha waves, which are the main manifestations of electrical activity when the cerebral cortex is awake, quiet and closed, and the alpha wave disappears immediately when people open their eyes, think about problems or accept other stimuli. Beta waves are an exciting manifestation of the brain cortex, which occurs only in the frontal lobe when quiet eyes are closed. If you open your eyes, think about problems, and suddenly hear sounds, beta waves will be triggered in other areas of the cortex. Theta waves appear in emotional stimuli such as drowsiness, disappointment, frustration, and so on. These different waveforms reflect the mental state of the subjects.

How to analyze the data obtained from EEG research?

Through complex technical processing, with the aid of EEG data analysis tools, such as Eeglab, by Fourier transform or wavelet analysis, we can put the complex brain waveform into a starting point, and then the different waveform distribution of the hybrid (as shown below), or the average of all the waveforms, to get a general waveform diagram. The waveform in a specific time period can be analyzed to analyze the physical/mental activity of the brain during a specific time period.

We are concerned not only with the overall state of the brain, but also with the specific mental elements associated with the task, such as the degree of attention, memory, and emotional response associated with the task.

1, emotional indicators: The brain's left and right frontal lobe is sensitive to positive emotions and negative emotions, through the analysis of their biases to understand the user's positive and negative mood changes.

2, attention to indicators: the brain's left and right parietal lobe is to control the allocation of brain area, to understand the user attention to distribution.

3, Memory Index: temporal lobe control our memory, can encode and recall environmental information, through the analysis of the temporal lobe, can understand the user's memory of the product.

The on-line of the eye movement instrument and the brain electrical equipment

EEG data are often more complex and need to be professionally trained. Especially the synchronization of the eye-moving instrument and the EEG instrument. In terms of hardware, there are already mature online solutions for SMI and Neuroscan Systems, and the online use of commercially used tobii eye actuators and Neuroscan or BP systems requires third-party hardware support. In terms of software, to ensure that the eye movement and EEG equipment online, the need for professional stimulation rendering software, such as psychological research commonly used to stimulate the presentation of software Eprime or the use of MATLAB to develop experimental procedures. After solving the problem of synchronization between hardware and software, we can analyze the behavior experiment data, eye movement data and EEG data at the same starting point. You can get a "holographic" message about how users do, how to look, and how to think about this user experience.

Business applications for eye movement & Brain Power

The synchronous research of eye movement & EEG is used for advertising effect evaluation, web browsing, product packaging and so on. Through online analysis, we can interpret the main mental activities of the brain, including the degree of attention, memory, and emotional response when browsing ads.

The following figure is a classic case of vecchiato& Babiloni (2011), which uses EEG to study the memory effects of Pepsi-Cola ads. In this study, the brain activity model of the subjects was different, the overall trend was that the better the memory score of the advertisement, the greater the GFP area of the memory-related brain region (mainly the temporal lobe). With the help of the eye, we can know the area size of the GFP associated with the memory when the user looks at any area of the advertisement. Therefore, we can infer the effect of the advertising memory.

The red line indicates that the subjects with good memory scores are GFP, and the blue lines indicate the GFP of the subjects with poor memory performance, and the difference can reflect the memory effect of the advertisement. The picture comes from vecchiato& babiloni,2011.

Summary: The use of new tools, new methods will always provide us with new research ideas and research direction, can provide us with more information to facilitate the optimization of our products. The combination of eye movement & EEG is a new research direction, which combines the intuition of eye movement data with the depth, precision and comprehensiveness of EEG data, and can provide the user with almost "holographic" information when using the product. Through the two online, we can accurately locate the user in the browsing the product brain activities, mining users deep heart attitude, emotion, cognitive level.

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