Avanza improves online services with eye tracking

Avanza is Sweden’s leading online platform for savings and investments. Because all transactions occur through its website ensuring it’s not only reliable but also intuitive to use is essential for customer satisfaction and continued growth.

The question

Avanza wanted to know in more detail how customers interact with its online platform. The company had a robust agile UX testing process in place, however it was sometimes difficult to get information on participants’ thought processes during tests, such as when they paused between actions or were reading content. Because of privacy regulations it’s not possible to record test sessions, so the UX team and other stakeholders had only one opportunity to observe a participant’s behavior, which was during the test. Avanza wanted an easy solution that would deliver their UX team better insights into user behavior and provide a better method of sharing tests with stakeholders without recording them.

The method

Avanza incorporated Tobii Pro’s eye tracking and software solutions into their UX testing processes to allow stakeholders to remotely view the gaze data of participants during live test sessions. This allows multiple people to observe how the user is interacting with various features and texts on the website while carrying out a specified task. In this way, the observers can see the user’s behavior themselves and have the opportunity to communicate with the test moderator through text to get immediate feedback on questions arising from watching the test take place.

The outcome

Seeing the user’s gaze delivered a deeper level of insight into the reasons behind their actions, and highlighted behaviors which might otherwise not have been obvious to the UX team. The live gaze data reduced the need to interrupt a test participant with questions about certain behaviors, for example, if they stopped moving the mouse or navigating the site, eye tracking revealed where their visual attention was focused and showed if they were searching for something or were engaging with the content. It also provided validation of successful design features and elements which achieved their desired goal and allowed stakeholders within the organization to easily join and observe test sessions without disturbing the test session and without the need for any new infrastructure to facilitate observation.