Skip to content
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 – but only a few will break through.
Why Standout Matters
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.
Only a few cues break through the noise. If your packaging doesn’t hit those cues, it won’t enter the decision process at all.
Fortunately, the human brain is a precisely tuned, efficient machine with various mechanisms that filter through a myriad of sensory input to ensure only select stimuli enter into conscious awareness.
What Really Happens When People Look at a Shelf
People don’t consciously evaluate every product. They rely on a fast, automatic system that spots only a few elements before moving on.
This has big implications for brand design. Packs that fail to deliver clear, immediate cues lose out to competitors even when the product is stronger.
At Mindlab, we have devised a number of tests that allow us to assess how easily and rapidly products are able to attract consumer attention, and which ones fade into the background.
How We Do It
Our methods show how quickly and clearly your product cuts through visual clutter – on shelf, online, or anywhere it appears.
Automatic Standout
Automatic standout describes 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. This ability to stand out can be measured using an online test built on the principle of change blindness. People are quicker at noticing changes in objects that are dominant in their visual field, and we use this phenomenon to our advantage, allowing us to measure not just where someone is looking, but rather what exactly their attention is drawn to.
This type of test can be used to find out how strongly products stand out on shelf or in an online environment, how likely a billboard is to be noticed, or even shed light on the visual hierarchy of product packaging (which elements are noticed first, which ones fade into the background?).
Product Findability
To assess how easy it is for people to find different products and packaging designs amongst competitors (i.e. at the point of sale), we implement a visual search task.
This is particularly useful when you’re changing the design of an already existing product (making sure that your loyal consumers still find it easily), but is generally a good thing to validate to ensure that shoppers instantly know what your product is, who it is by, and what it delivers.
By observing how quickly and accurately people can locate your product in a cluttered environment, we gain insight into the strength of your visual cues and the clarity of your brand’s presence – both critical for driving recognition and purchase in fast-paced retail settings.
Seen what we do but wonder who we do it for?
We thought you might like to see some of the clients we work with...
