I recently had the honor of testing out a really interesting service called YouEye for gathering visitor feedback of your website and application. We’ve all seen the taste testing commercials and the focus groups where a bunch of people sit in a room and review a product. The problem with this type of feedback is that people have the ability to fudge or downright lie about their real feelings. All you can really go on is what people say or write.

Understand Your Website Visitors Point of View

YouEye is very different. It captures the video of the person reviewing your website, but it also tracks emotional response from their body language and displays this as a timeline graph while the video is playing. See the video below for a demo of what it looks like.

YouEye Demo

Here is a quote from their CEO, Kyle Henderson, on the real power of this tool and why it works.

“What people do and what they say has always been a huge issue in the research space – especially focus groups. That is why at YouEye, in addition to someone’s spoken and written feedback, we provide our customers with recordings of “what people do.” You can observe each participant’s activities in screen recordings, review reactions with webcam videos, and see aggregated task statistics across a study.

YouEye also offers cutting edge facial expression recognition software that identifies positive and negative emotion moments for each and across all participants. Our customers can source demographics from our panel, review participant page flows, clicks, commentary, emotional reactions, and aggregated survey information for a rapid (within 72hrs guaranteed) and insightful offering that empowers agile research.”

Using YouEye to Improve Your Website

Doing focus groups has lost a lot of validity over time because people are able to say one thing and mean another. YouEye has taken a real step at taking that issue out of the equation. You still have to listen to what people say, but being able to read body language and emotions is critical to real focus group studies of a website or web app.

One thing to take into consideration is that people are very visual. Not everyone is going to like your site simply because they don’t like the color, or they may just be in a bad mood. When doing studies like this, you need to get a large enough audience for it to have enough significance to make real changes.

Another aspect that I really like is that an audience that has never seen your site or app before can uncover things you’ve never thought about. These little tidbits of information can be a golden opportunity for mining new ideas.