How We Read With Our Eyes: A Beginner’s Guide to Eye-Tracking

In today’s crowded digital and physical spaces, understanding where people look and why can make or break a design, message, or brand moment. Whether it's a product on a shelf, a logo on a screen, or a campaign ad on social media, human attention is the real currency.

This is where eye-tracking comes in. It’s one of the core tools in the NeuroAnalytics toolbox, and it helps decode what captures our attention, how long we linger, and what we miss entirely, often without realizing it.

Let’s break it down.

What Is Eye-Tracking?

Eye-tracking is a research method that measures where, when, and how long people look at different parts of a visual scene. Using sensors and webcams, it records the movement of the eyes as they navigate across images, videos, websites, packaging, or physical spaces.

It helps answer:

• What drew attention first?
• Which areas held attention the longest?
• What did the viewer skip?

Key Eye-Tracking Metrics Explained

To understand eye-tracking, you need to get familiar with a few core metrics and visual outputs:

1. Fixations

These are moments when the eyes stop to process information. Longer or more frequent fixations on a spot usually indicate interest, importance, or difficulty.

2. Saccades

These are the rapid movements the eyes make between fixations. They're not about seeing, they’re about searching.

3. Heatmaps

Heatmaps show aggregated areas of visual attention. Warmer colors (like red or orange) indicate more attention; cooler colors show less. They’re excellent for spotting hotspots of viewer focus.

4. Gaze Plots

These show the sequence of eye movements across a screen, numbered in the order they occurred. Gaze plots help us understand navigation, flow, and visual hierarchy.