Retail Insight from SimpleUsability

Did you know that the vast majority of shopping behaviour results from subconscious and not rational or reasoned thought?

Neuroscientists estimate that as much as 90% of human behaviour is automatic and emotionally driven. This is especially true of the act of shopping, where purchase decisions are extremely rapid, complex and highly contextual. Eye tracking can identify these transient moments in a shoppers' journey, and provide a window into the thoughts and motivations that are of most interest to retailers, but that consumers often find hard, or even impossible to recall and verbalise after the fact.

Conventional accompanied shops interfere with the natural shopping experience and so produce unnatural behaviour. They also rely on self-report which, in addition to social desirability factors, is constrained by the limits of human recall. This limited cognitive access, coupled with the subconscious nature of most purchase decisions, leads to a tendency to confabulate (infer the reasons for our actions).

In summary, we're surprisingly poor judges and predictors of our own behaviour and while these traditional metrics can work well to explain attitudes, in a retail environment they'll never tell the whole story. We use groundbreaking technology to uncover this part of consumer experience that is otherwise inaccessible to conscious awareness.

Our unobtrusive mobile eye-tracking technology allows participants to shop on their own, with minimal researcher intervention. We combine post-task interviews (using the eye tracking playback as a prompt) and analysis of the data using heatmaps, beeswarms and other visualization techniques to ensure maximum objectivity and minimum inference.

To find out more about how we use eye tracking in retail.