Eye tracking is a white hot area of interest in market research and Tobii is the technological leader in this space.

Barbara Barclay, General Manager at Tobii, was kind enough to give Future of Insight an in-depth interview.

Robert Moran:
First, tell us a little bit about Tobii.

Barbara Barclay:
Tobii Technology is the global market leader in eye tracking and eye control. The company was founded in 2001 in Stockholm, Sweden, and was the first to introduce “remote” eye tracking to the world – that is, a system for eye tracking that is completely unobtrusive and virtually invisible to the research subject. This new technology in many ways revolutionized the industry. Tobii’s products are widely used by researchers who measure visibility and attention within the scientific community and in commercial market research and usability studies. They also are used by people with disabilities as a means to communicate.

In terms of international growth, Tobii first came to the United States in 2004 with a single salesperson on the West Coast. We set up our first office in Falls Church, Va., in late November 2005, and our North American office is still in Falls Church. Tobii also has offices in Germany, Norway, Japan and China.

Robert Moran:
Wow. Interesting, I didn’t realize that you had somebody in the US doing that in 2006. I just assumed it was even more recent.

Barbara Barclay:
I think some of our early clients – like Microsoft, the University of California at Davis and UserCentric – starting working with Tobii in 2005 and possibly even 2004. They were our early adopters.

Robert Moran:
What percentage of Tobii’s revenue is derived from the market research space as opposed to sales, say, in assistive technology or the scientific research spaces?

Barbara Barclay:
The business as a whole has three distinct business units that are run as separate companies. Two of these units each generate about 50 percent of the revenue – Assistive Technology and Analysis. The assistive technology business develops and sells Tobii eye control products designed to help people with disabilities to lead a fuller, more meaningful life. The analysis business develops and provides eye tracking solutions to scientific, product usability and market research customers. The third business unit is our Future Markets group, which is focused on generating new products, tools and technologies based on eye tracking to meet the future needs of various industries, specifically automotive, computer control and medical.

Robert Moran:
Was market research originally a point of focus? You know, I have heard that the technology was originally created for the scientific and assistive technology spaces, right?

Barbara Barclay:
Well, that is partly true. The original vision for Tobii eye tracking was future mass-market implementation.

However, the funding available to the founders at the time they started the company made them focus on more immediate, practical applications of the technology that could be developed and brought to market quickly.

Those applications ended up being in the assistive technology business, where there was truly a critical need for advancements in technology to help people communicate, and also, obviously, there were fantastic applications for the scientific community in many areas.

Robert Moran:
Interesting. I heard somewhere that the original uptake of the product was more in helping folks who needed eye tracking to help them communicate and live a fuller life. Is that accurate?

Barbara Barclay:
Yes. That’s the assistive technology segment. There, our eye trackers are used for eye control, which allows those who are unable to speak due to physical disabilities to communicate using eye movement.

The majority of these customers have either cerebral palsy or ALS [also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease]. The Tobii products in this area are a total life changer.

Robert Moran:
Right.

Barbara Barclay:
The scientific and assistive areas definitely were the focus point for early company achievement and growth. But I think the vision for where the company is headed is still mass-market applications, such as transportation, shopping, home entertainment and much more. There are so many possible applications that our biggest challenge is knowing where to start.

Robert Moran:
I think this is useful for folks in the market research industry to get a broader sense of what this technology is being used for today. And this might actually help us be even more creative in our thinking.

You know, we have used Tobii’s eye tracking technology to test print ads, but I do want to get a sense of where Tobii is getting the most use in the market research space today. Would you say ad testing, or package design, or retail environment, or Web site usability? Where are you getting the most uptake today within market research?

Barbara Barclay:
Outside of scientific research, usability professionals were the early adopters of eye tracking in the business research arena, and perhaps one of the groups we see the greatest returns, in terms of growing applications and use of current technology. In fact, Tobii products are being widely used in usability studies by all of the largest online content providers and application developers.

On the market research side, you have some early adopters such as Procter & Gamble, which has been a Tobii client for a very long time. Within market research, much of the work is package- and shelf-related and advertisement testing – both on- and offline. But in terms of mainstream usability and mainstream market research, we are just now entering a phase where you have usability professionals who have been working for a long time in the industry and suddenly they are getting requests from their clients to include eye tracking with their studies.

Robert Moran:
That’s a good point. When I think about our client base, they aren’t requesting eye tracking. They don’t even know to think of using that technology.

So we end up proactively bringing it to them where we think it makes the most sense. I imagine mass acceptance will take a little time. I mean, we are still talking about a six-year-old solution.

Barbara Barclay:
Absolute infancy. You are at the leading edge of what is going on, and the biggest impediment to eye tracking, both in usability and market research, is awareness. “What is it? How does it work, and how does it help me?” Additionally, clients want to know, “If I’m going to do it, what does it mean? What conclusions should I draw from it for my customers?”

Robert Moran:
That was, candidly, the most fun in using the technology for us. Here we have all this data that we would never have even thought of being able to generate before and now we have to make sense of it. It became a really fun intellectual challenge of looking at the key fixation points, how long they are lingering, and the eye flow from text to graphics and graphics back to text. How long are people lingering on some of the key text we want them to linger on? We, I think to be fair, we are still evolving what those metrics for success are, and I think that my guess is that most of the folks like us who are using this technology have still not come to a mature and final set of core metrics on how to use it. I think we are still learning, to be honest.

Barbara Barclay:
Absolutely true. And that’s just a reflection of how young it is. In fact, you’ve got this example I gave you of the usability professional. On the market research side, it’s not dissimilar in terms of its stage; it’s just a more complex market structure. There are so many different access points for people who are in this business. In market research, you can do eye tracking studies on packages, ads, shelves, commercials and products themselves.

You have the brands themselves, which benefit internally; the large research firms; and small boutique firms that do brand work, small analytical market research firms that analyze sales and loyalty data, panel data and others. They are more numerical and analytical. For them, it is actually easier, and I am not sure of the background of the different employees that you have, but if you have somebody who is more of a “quant jock” – not because it is hard to interpret the data but because they see this technology – they all of a sudden see all the possibilities without much training. And so they love it.

Robert Moran:
We tend to take a quantitative approach where we are testing multiple executions on the same ad theme. And then we are comparing the metrics across. Now, you know one of the obvious challenges is getting your sample size for each ad execution large enough that you can draw some meaningful conclusions across each ad execution. But we love playing with it.

Barbara Barclay:
Well I have a question for you. Were you doing advertising testing before eye tracking?

Robert Moran:
Yes.

Barbara Barclay:
That’s a perfect background.

Robert Moran:
Candidly, one of the things we were trying to figure out is how we can incorporate, not in sort of static ad testing, but in a 30-second or 60-second spot how we could incorporate online dial testing with eye tracking data so that we know – so that if you combine the two you know what audience reactions are in real time to what they are seeing and hearing. Once you can get that honed then I think you are in great shape. One of the challenges is that there is a little bit of lag on the dial testing between how you are rating your response versus the moment that you receive that response. It gets into the weeds. But that is one of the questions, you know; how to adjust for that lag is one of the things we have asked ourselves. But I was going to ask you about shelf testing. We haven’t done that with Tobii, but are you seeing shelf testing being done with the eye tracking?

Barbara Barclay:
Oh, absolutely.

Robert Moran:
Okay.

Barbara Barclay:
I’d say on the usability side, there is a significant amount of both qualitative and quantitative usability testing on websites and applications. On the market research side there is package testing including package design and the elements of a specific package. Then there is shelf testing, which would be visibility on the shelf. There is in-store testing, which may include store elements and layout. There is also online ad testing, print ad testing and broadcast commercial testing.

Robert Moran:
I could see package design, I could see this being very useful for packaging, and, candidly, we haven’t done any eye tracking on the package-design side.

Barbara Barclay:
Sure, and also think about how helpful this kind of data could be to analyze in-store promotions. The amount of money corporations invest to deploy in-store promotions is huge, and here’s a way to determine whether they are going to be effective before you fully invest.

We have a company right now that designs in-store promotions and is looking to use eye tracking. How do you create an in-store promotion that has the most stopping power, and what it is that you are trying to convey with that in-store promotion? Do people stop, do they look at it? Do they see the elements that you want them to see?

Robert Moran:
I would assume that you could use this as one of several tools to improve, in a retail environment, that point-of-sale experience and to optimize what the consumer is seeing at that point of sale.

Barbara Barclay:
Absolutely. And there is so much opportunity to do that type of thing, because there is signage, shelf pricing, end-aisle displays, in-aisle displays and promotions. You can turn your attention to almost anything.

Every day I am amazed by someone new who says, “I would like to try the following.” I mean these are obvious applications, and of course there are others, where our clients combine our data with EEG, heart rate and other biometrics. We also have clients linking Tobii eye tracking to virtual reality.

Robert Moran:
Aha. That’s very smart.

Barbara Barclay:
Yes, it’s the next dimension.

Robert Moran:
Very smart.

Barbara Barclay:
And there is a lot of work going on in the virtual arena as it pertains to eye tracking. But it is in the discovery stage right now. There are a few players who are doing virtual, but I would say it is not particularly well-developed. And virtual kind of falls over into the gaming arena as well, where people are looking at eye tracking in gaming.

Robert Moran:
I can imagine that being very useful for game design. Do you sell, do you do any work in, I’m using the word “gaming” in a different sense. Do you do any work, or do you sell any of these kits to any of the casinos?

Barbara Barclay:
We haven’t sold to the casinos, but definitely to gaming companies. Computer control is, of course, a strategic element of what we do, and obviously, computer control is the fundamental element of the assistive technology business. But think of using eye control that reacts when you look at an in-store display that can react when you look at it and show you different images depending on what you glance at. Or in a game, eye control could help you drive the game.

Robert Moran:
Oh, completely.

Barbara Barclay:
Customers today buy our software development kit, and it is being done today. If you look on YouTube and type in “Tobii” you won’t believe all the examples of people doing all kinds of crazy things, including games.

Robert Moran:
You know I read somewhere about, I think it was, a university doing a study to try to see if they could use eye tracking to better segment individuals by their level of decisiveness or hesitancy.

Barbara Barclay:
Oh, I am certain that you could do that. Another example of another experiment was that a woman called me and she said, “I am in fashion merchandising at a university.” She has been borrowing the Tobii eye tracker in the psychology department and she wants to understand how people look at a person in a dress or other designed clothing. How do they look at clothing that’s being designed? What do they look at?

Other mostly academic organizations are interested in human interaction in social situations – where does a person look?

Robert Moran:
Hmmm. Well, you know what’s funny – we know just from our own work that people do tend to fixate heavily on the face.

Barbara Barclay:
Oh, certainly. And, of course that influences how you design your ads and how you tweak ads, doesn’t it?

Robert Moran:
Yes. But it must be something about us as humans that we do fixate on that face so much. I mean, it almost screams off the page when you do your data overlays and in any kind of advertising. Just the focus on the face.

Barbara Barclay:
Absolutely.

Robert Moran:
Yeah.

Barbara Barclay:
Well, in fact, I would say the major categories of scientific experiments that are taking place in the university environment today with Tobii eye trackers – one of our largest groups of users – is in the infant labs. A lot of the work being done is on various experiments, sometimes multiyear experiments, to build models for early detection of autism and ADD [attention deficit disorder]. Some of the elements of being autistic have to do with your recognition of emotion on the face.

There are all sorts of experiments in which researchers are trying to understand development of the brain related to your age and your eyes, to determine what you think you see. I was talking with a fellow the other day at a major university. They conduct reading studies, and it’s interesting to see who reads every word and who skims, by both ability and by age and personality type.

Robert Moran:
I know that when we test print ads, we notice tracking through the copy, reading through the copy, and then stopping and backtracking because something confuses them. It’s not the word itself necessarily. These are adults who can read. It’s that word choice or meaning that is confusing them or stopping them…

Barbara Barclay:
Absolutely.

Robert Moran:
…and it’s interesting to see how that works. {laughter}

Barbara Barclay:
Yes, that’s exactly the same when you are a child and you are learning how to read. When you come across text that is more challenging, you linger, or you will turn back to look at something again. It is so similar.

Robert Moran:
So let me ask. How do you see passive data collection technologies like eye tracking impacting the market research space over the next five years?

Barbara Barclay:
Today I see passive technology impacting the market already, and there are obviously a lot of folks using our technology combined with other biometrics. Eye tracking has the advantage of being truly objective and it is always included with other biometrics as a stable element combined with them.

Robert Moran:
Right.

Barbara Barclay:
I believe that in five years eye tracking in Web design, package design, shelf testing and advertising testing will be a must do. An absolute must do.

Robert Moran:
I agree.

Barbara Barclay:
You wouldn’t even dream of not doing it at a developed, larger organization with proper labs or proper market research. It is just one more step in confirming the decisions that you are making. And to some extent, it’s taking the subjectivity out of the design.

Robert Moran:
Right.

Barbara Barclay:
And the cost of observing without eye tracking? “Oh, I think they looked at that, didn’t they?”

Robert Moran:
Yeah, I think the challenge there is that the industry, the market research industry – the industry that I am in – we are all probably experimenting with some of our metrics and how we are analyzing the data we get, but we will have to mature somewhat to develop a common language around the metrics we use in order for us to talk to each other and with our clients across projects. To my thinking, the metric side is actually critical now.

Barbara Barclay:
Yes. And to help the market grow rapidly, there is a great need for training. We just hired a training manager for that reason. Some of the responsibility of that role will be to help with what I would call a certification process that gives people in different fields some basic information and understanding of the ranges of use, data outputs and best practices, as well as an understanding of and an ability to answer basic questions such as, “Why is the data significant and what does it mean?”

Robert Moran:
You know what would be interesting is if you and a teaching organization collaborated on a course, a two-day course of study certified by them.

Barbara Barclay:
We definitely have a plan to try to develop a future course in collaboration with academic or training institutions.

Robert Moran:
Great!

Robert Moran:
Now what are your thoughts on what the market research industry might look like in 2019? I mean I realize this is…

Barbara Barclay:
Mmmmmmm. {chuckles}

Robert Moran:
…colored by your experience, but I am interested in your thoughts.

Barbara Barclay:
Well, there is actually a lot of recent work going on toward this kind of integration with different biometric methodologies. And I definitely believe the holy grail is getting to the point where you don’t interfere with the person you are researching; you simply capture the information by what they do. And you prefer to ask them as little as possible because we all know the challenges and low relevancy of self-reported data.

Robert Moran:
Correct. I agree to the purely passive approach.

Barbara Barclay:
Yes. I think it will get closer and closer to passive research, and I think there will be true integration of the passive tools that are available, along with validation of the methodologies behind them. There is no question that eye tracking is a technology with a huge future. I think that is fairly straightforward because it is objective and there are paths of technologies, objective passive technologies and subjective passive technologies. If you are looking at something, you are looking at it. Now, the subjective element is what you are thinking about it and how you feel about what you are looking at. But, still, when you are looking at it you are looking at it. It’s objective. With all the related biometrics – whether it is dial or heart rate, skin response, temperature, EEG, facial coding, or other things that have a subjective element or an interpretive element, they ultimately require validation of some sort for more acceptance, right? But I have no question in my mind that they will be in wide use as a combined toolkit.

Robert Moran:
What’s interesting is that when we are using it now you can see where people linger, you know areas that they are fixating on, how they are jumping – and then you just simply ask them very open-ended questions, as we tend to do in our business, about, you know – “Well, tell me, what was your experience looking at this print ad?” Over time you’ll get a lot of answers as to why they might be lingering on one thing or the other. And then you can match it up with what you see, and we have all sorts of interesting and just fascinating examples of things that that I can’t share because they are for clients, but it is absolutely fascinating and I know that the advertising folks we work with have loved it because it gives them a level of detail that they just didn’t have before as to how people might be reacting to just one image that they had produced, for example.

Barbara Barclay:
It is, and what’s really interesting is if you bring eye tracking into an environment from the wrong angle. Then it is perceived as a threat. But if you bring eye tracking into the environment at the right angle then the reaction is very positive.

I remember a story from one of my clients – it was an entertainment client, and I said, “Gosh, I am curious as to why more people aren’t using eye tracking for film trailers to optimize the experience of a person in the audience (or so that a brand knows if the product placement is effective).” Every one of us has seen a film trailer that didn’t represent the movie accurately.

Robert Moran:
Right.

Barbara Barclay:
And the interesting thing he said was, “Oh, you know they tried that some years ago, and the agency came in with some eye tracking on a trailer that had been done and presented to the group of people who had made the trailer, and they (the agency) criticized the trailer using eye tracking.” Well, you are not going to get anywhere with that approach.

Robert Moran:
Right.

Barbara Barclay:
You take eye tracking to the people who are designing the trailer and you say, “If you can use this while you are making the trailer, it can help make sure that the point you are trying to get across is the point that actually people see. It’s a tool for you to make it better while you are making it.”

Robert Moran:
Exactly. If you stand out and just criticize but you are not being constructive, it doesn’t help. It is so funny because this is why we’ve moved towards iterative research designs. So we test, we learn, we tweak, we go back, and it’s a cycle. And so it used to be that you’d have a two-phase research design that was qual and quant, and we are trying to move much more toward a research design that looks like a cycle where we keep learning instead of just a two-part dance. And I think you could use – we’ve used eye tracking in this way and I think then it’s not – you’re not using it to critique someone’s work. You’re using it as a way to help them refine it and play around with it, to make it better. To optimize it.

Barbara Barclay:
Yes, certainly.

Robert Moran:
Exactly. Well this has been a fantastic interview. Thank you so much for your time.

Barbara Barclay:
It was a pleasure speaking with you.