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How we do it
Measuring visual attention
Can you tell which visual elements people notice? We can.
Every time you enter a store, you are bombarded with thousands of products that are all vying for your attention. Even when you know exactly what you are looking to buy, you must scan through hundreds of products to find what you are looking for.
Fortunately, the human brain is a precisely tuned, efficiency machine with various mechanisms that filter through a myriad of sensory input to ensure only select stimuli enter into conscious awareness.
This has implications for consumer behaviour in the modern world. Brands must ensure that the packaging for their products is able to capture the attention of customers in the face of many competitors. At Mindlab, we have devised a number of tests that allow us to assess how easily/rapidly products are able to attract consumer attention.
Automatic standout
To capture shelf standout, we use an experiment based on the principle of change blindness.
Automatic standout is how well elements such as products on a shelf stand out next to other similar elements. It is a measure of how likely a product is able to capture attention. Visual salience can be measured using an online test. The theoretical premise for this test is that individuals are quicker at noticing changes in objects that are dominant in their visual field. This theory is based on the phenomenon of change blindness, or inattentional blindness, which describes the inability to detect seemingly obvious changes to an object or scene.
In our standout test, participants are presented with, for example a mock shelf filled with a range of products, i.e. cans of drink.
This test typically consists of multiple trials where participants look for changes in their visual field.
The automatic standout of a visual component is measured by the average time it takes for participants to locate the given product relative to its competitors. This is a semi-implicit test that allows us to assess people’s unconscious visual biases. A limiting feature of the test is that as attention tends to be drawn to the centre of the screen, products in the middle of the shelf are advantageously positioned. This limitation can be overcome by randomisation of the layout of elements between trials.
Findability
To assess how easy it is for people to find different products/packaging designs amongst competitors (i.e. at the point of sale), we implement a visual search task.
Participants are presented with a line-up of similar products from different brands and are instructed to locate a specific product in the lineup as quickly as possible. By putting participants under time pressure, we force them to rely on mental shortcuts as they would for many real world decisions. The less time it takes a participant to correctly locate and click on given product, the higher the findability of the product. This test is especially important to ensure findability is not reduced when changing pack designs, e.g, for retaining current customers.
