#youeye

YouEye Raises $3M For Its Webcam-Based Usability Testing Service With Emotion Recognition

YouEye, an usability testing service that uses a pool of screened candidates to support designers and developer get feedback for their sites, today announced that it has raised a $3 million funding circular led by investors Bobby Yazdani, the founder and CEO of Saba app and an investor in Dropbox, Google, Qwiki, Brian McClendon, the co-founder of Keyhole, Inc (which later became Google Earth) and

I just completed some remote usability testing (3 on usertesting.com, 3 on youeye.com) for a new tool I am working on at my company, Smart Destinations. Sure, I learned about some flaws in the interface, but I also learned a few things about setting up remote usability testing:

1. Be explicit in your instructions; avoid pronouns.

My first task read:

"What can you do on this page? How do you expect it to work?"

In normal writing or speech, "it" would clearly refer to "this page." However, almost all participants assumed "it" referred to the product discussed on the page, the Go Chicago Card. This led to some confusion and frustration for them, and little useful feedback for me.

2. Provide enough information

It's hard to strike the right balance between giving testers sufficient context and bogging them down with details or worse, providing them information you actually want them to get from the page(s) you're testing. However, if your test is focused, especially on a subpage or specific feature, it's better to err on the side of too much information, so the tester doesn't get distracted and veer off course.

3. Make clear what portion of the site the person will be testing.

Most people assume they are starting on (what they refer to as) the "homepage." This struck me as odd, given how few of our site's visitors actually do start on the homepage. Do they assume this only in the context of usability testing? Or whenever people click through to a website from a search engine result page, do they generally assume they're landing on the "homepage"? Perhaps people misunderstand what a homepage is? I'm not sure, but the upshot is you may want to make clear in the introduction where in the overall site hierarchy the tested page sits.

4. Steve Krug is right, 3 is enough.

Obviously, this is not my own discovery. I chose 6 participants for this test, but learned 95% of what I learned overall after the first three participants. It would far more productive to do frequent tests with fewer participants.

5. Seeing people's faces may not be all that helpful

In my last post I wrote about the drastic difference between UserTesting.com's testers and YouEye's testers. There are functional differences between the two platforms as well. Aside from just the less-full-featured interface on YouEye, the major difference is that you can see YouEye testers via their webcams alongside their screens.

Unfortunately, the effectiveness of the webcam is hampered by another YouEye feature -- "emotion data." From their site:

Our rapid feedback study provides you with a participant’s webcam recording, survey responses and emotion data — all of the building blocks you need to start iterating today.

From the videos, it appears the test participants are instructed to keep their head straight and still, presumably so that YouEye can analyze their faces and provide an "emotion graph" which plays along with the video. However, the system is ineffective at transcribing testers' emotions. And, because the testers aren't free to move their body and head, it becomes much less useful to see them at all. One thing humans excel at (or some of them anyway) is reading emotion on other humans' faces, so the "emotion data" for me is not value added, but only detracts from the utility of seeing the testers' physical response as they complete tasks.

See if you agree with YouEye's emotion assessments below (grey=average, red=puzzled, green=happy):

While the participant is unnaturally still and expressionless, YouEye registers average, puzzled, and some mix of puzzled and happy. In fact, puzzled and happy are the only two emotions that appeared on any of the testers' graphs.

I recently set up two online usability tests, one with usertesting.com, one with the youeye.com. I set them up with the same introduction, tasks, and follow-up questions, making them as similar as possible.

The results were remarkably different. There are functional differences between the two services, mainly:

YouEye records the webcam of the tester and tries to record their emotions (more on that in a later post)

UserTesting.com has simply been around longer, and has developed some really nice functionality like watching videos at 2x speed and exporting annotations to Excel.

But, the stark difference was the testers. I wrote earlier about how the UserTesting.com testers seemed rather expert at web browsing, as well as overly positive about the experience. In contrast, the YouEye testers showed honest confusion and displeasure, and generally seemed to approach the site much more like a real, casual user would. Now, in the end, the majority were still generally positive about our product, but the videos revealed much more about the failings of the webpage they were testing.

Another interesting difference was that the YouEye users took from 3 to 9 minutes to complete the same tasks that the usertesting.com users took from 11 to 25 minutes to do. No time limit or goal is imposed on either site, as far as I know, so I'm not really sure what would cause this difference.

YouEye : 

Easy User Testing

Eye tracking may soon become the next big thing in market research

Crowdsourced Eye Tracking via Fast Company

The psychology lab that I work in makes use of eye tracking so I have a pretty good understanding of how it works and I've gotta say ... it's pretty cool.

From a marketing perspective, I think it's great that this type of information will now be available for analysis and will affect the way things are marketed/produced.

As a consumer, I'm a little creeped out. According to the company's site, audio and video are also recorded for research purposes. It kinda feels like being on the other end of a two-way glass.

Amplify’d from www.readwriteweb.com

User testing with eye-tracking software can be an expensive undertaking. But a start-up on stage today at LAUNCH may offer a way to simplify that process - both in terms of cost, testers, and technology.

YouEye uses a webcam to record users' behavior on a website. Eye-tracking can point to the areas on your site where users are drawn and those that they ignore. By using an online, web-based and webcam solution, the service means that you can avoid complex eye-tracking cameras, and in turn, recruit testers without requiring they own specific equipment.

See more at www.readwriteweb.com