Beata Lewandowska, Customer Success Manager
5 min read
Using RealEye is easy, even if you don’t have any experience. It’s user-friendly, but if you need any assistance or have any questions, the RealEye team is always ready to help. Find out by yourself why customers appreciate their support.
Now, let’s discuss all the steps needed to use the services.
- Registration
RealEye is a webcam eye-tracking software used by many research companies, psychologists, graphic designers, etc. As we received many requests from students and universities, we found it important to enable them making such studies, so we created an offer dedicated to them:
The first step is to go to the mentioned page and click the “Get free access” button (in the top right corner).
This will redirect you to the registration form:
What does “free access” mean? It means that before paying anything you can:
- get access to your Account Dashboard,
- create your first study (name it, set options, add items and change their settings),
- preview your study to see how it will look for your testers.
Of course, you’ll still be able to see the technological demo and sample results.
To go further, you need to purchase a plan. You can do so right after registration by clicking the “Subscribe button” and scroll down for educational plans.
You can also purchase a plan later, after setting up your first study and before choosing the number of testers for this study.
NOTE: If you’re a student invited by your professor, you need to register using directly a link given to you. Then you don’t have to confirm your student status or purchase anything.
If you’re a professor, please, contact us to receive such a link.
- Student plan and the University plan
These plans are meant for non-commercial use only. That means you can use RealEye for any kind of project, but you can’t charge any money for its results or insights. Thesis and scientific articles are allowed. If you need more details, please contact us at contact@realeye.io or by using our chat.
What does it mean?
- unlimited studies – there is no limit on how many studies you can create,
- own testers/month – you can invite to all your studies in summary as many testers, as you have monthly in your plan; within this limit you can create as many studies, as you want; the unused testers don’t stay to the next month, but you can buy additional testers ($1 for an own tester and $5 for a RealEye tester),
- Sampling rate: up to 15 Hz – we compute up to 15 gaze points per second, that gives a sample every 67 ms,
- Sampling rate: up to 60 Hz – for panelists using 60FPS webcam we can detect up to 60 gaze points per second (sample every 16 ms),
- max. study time X sec. – maximum time of your study, regardless of the number of items put in the study; for example, if in your study is only 1 item, it can be displayed for up to X seconds, but for the study combined of, let’s say 3 items, summed display time of all three of them can be at most X seconds; let’s say we have 600 seconds long study, so in case of having 3 item we can display them for 200+200+200 or 100+50+450 and so on (of course, 50+50+50 is still less than 600 seconds, so that will work too); for now it’s possible to set a “chain” of studies, to make the total time longer (a few studies one after another with a calibration process of the beginning of each one of them),
NOTE: there’s an upgrade coming in study length, so stay tuned - Heatmaps – graphical representations of data where values (density of gaze points) are represented as colors,
- AOI’s analyzer – Area Of Interest is an analytical tool to calculate quantitative eye movement measures – draw a boundary around an area of a chosen image and receive desired metrics: total time spent by viewers at this area, average time spent per view, average first view, gaze counter, viewers counter and words counter (see more about AOI in Analyzing data in the next part),
- Recordings – videos showing how tester’s eyes (gaze point) and cursor were moving over item(s) during the test,
- Multi-language instructions – enables displaying instructions for a tester in other languages than English; we can add any language, it’s just a matter of translating a few sentences from English to the language requested by you,
- External Surveys Integration – enables connecting study with external surveys (i.e. google forms, survio, mysurveylab, etc.); the survey time is not counted as the study time,
- Export to CSV – get your testers data in CSV file from any study (see more at https://support.realeye.io/data-export-to-csv/),
- Non-commercial use only – must not be used for commercial purposes (you can’t charge money for the results, but you can use it for your thesis or scientific articles),
- 1 user account/5 user accounts – number of users that can be registered to have access to the same account,
- Support – if needed contact RealEye via Email or Chat to receive support with your doubts; University plans will be marked as a priority,
- Cancel subscription anytime – cancel your subscription from your Account Dashboard anytime – your access will be available to the end of the billing period (30 days from the last payment),
In case of demand for larger studies, we can create a custom plan tailored to your needs.
NOTE: if you’re a student interested in using RealEye, try to talk to your professor about purchasing the University plan. Maybe there are more students or even academic staff interested in such research, or perhaps he/she would like to show to his/her students how eye-tracking works during classes? Then the University plan would pay off to you.
- Student status confirmation
After creating your Student account, please, contact us at contact@realeye.io to tell us which University (and faculty) are you from and to send us any proof of being a student.
- Creating a study
When you’re registered, you can create your first study. Click the “New Study” button placed in the middle of your dashboard or from the menu on the left. Then you can name your study (it’s called “My eye tracking study” by default, but you can change it) and choose proper options (you won’t be able to change them once you run the study):
- do you want your items (images) to be displayed in the order you put them or random (random makes it less likely that the order of items will affect the way that testers “read” the images, and you can check the order in which a tester saw the elements by checking his recording),
- do you want to show a separator between images (this will help tester eyes to relax),
- do you want to ask the testers for their name, gender and age at the end of the test (it’s not obligatory for testers),
- do you want to conduct the study within an external survey.
External Survey
After checking the last option, you’ll be able to put the Finished test redirect URL (which will redirect all the testers to your survey) and Skip test button URL, which will redirect testers to this URL in case they drop eye-tracking test.
To connect survey and test results with a tester, you will need to modify your test recruitment link to pass in the variables you want to track. You can add custom variables to your recruitment link using a “?” (question mark) and join multiple variables using an “&” (ampersand), as shown below.
In the presented example to a test URL was added two variables: user and company ID. This allows you to track who completed your test and match it with your survey.
TIP: If you don’t want to use an external survey, but also you don’t want to show testers their results (this happens automatically when there’s no redirection link), put https://www.realeye.io/finished-static as Finished test redirect URL and they’ll see statement shown below instead.
- Adding items
When your study is set up, you can add your item to it. An item is an image or a screenshot of a page (we don’t test real websites).
To add an image, click a given area and choose an item from your computer or simply drag and drop it there.
The picture needs to be a JPEG/PNG, max 12MB, with maximum dimensions (width and height) 15000px and a minimum 500px.
You can also past an URL to make a screenshot of a page you want to test. If this won’t work, please use one of the online screenshot tools and put it as an image.
The next step is to set options for each item (independently):
- additional message – add an instruction for testers before displaying the item; typed text will show for each tester before this image,
- display time – for how long a tester will see this image; remember, that 60 seconds is maximum display time for all items in total),
- enable scrolling – if it’s turned off a tester will see a whole picture at once (the image height will fit the browser), otherwise a tester will be able to scroll through the item; for small images it’s good to turn it off, but for page screenshots it’s recommended to turn this option on,
- finish on click – select a part of the image which when clicked by a tester will end a display of this item (so you can measure how fast it happened); this option is turned off by default, but to run it, click “turn on” and drag over the image to map the clicking area; before running the study you can change this area as many times as you want.
For example, set an instruction for testers to “choose the best offer” (click the CTA) and map the proper button. You can see in tester recording not only the gaze point of the tester, but also his cursor and clicks. Total time will indicate how fast the mapped area was clicked.
You can see how your study will look like for your testers by clicking the “Preview” button.
- Choosing testers. Who can be your tester?
Once you have everything set up, you can run the study by clicking the “Run Study” button placed in the right bottom corner. You’ll see a pop-up with a question about how many testers you want to invite to this study. The minimum number of testers is five, and the incrementation step is 5.
If you haven’t bought a plan yet, you need to do it now to run the study.
To become your tester, a person needs to have a PC/laptop with a webcam, internet connection and a Chrome browser (in case it doesn’t work, try incognito mode). All you need to do is send that person a link to your study from your Study Dashboard.
Other Languages
To display test in a language other than English, you need to put proper language prefix in URL for testers: www.realeye.io/<language-prefix>/test/test_id/
Supported languages are:
- cs – Czech,
- es – Spanish,
- de – German,
- pl – Polish.
For example, if the tester invitation URL is: https://www.realeye.io/test/8c8c9ae4-e8f4-466f-9cff-b8cb152dd9cb/ (this link won’t work, because the study no longer exists) and you want to display test in polish for your testers it should look like this:
and you can see the result below.
Remember, that we can add any language with your help. It’s just a matter of translating a few sentences from English to the language requested by you.
- Study dashboard
When you start the study, you’ll see the Study Dashboard, as shown below.
There you can find:
- A. Add panelists – if you find that there are not enough panelists for your study, you can increase the number of slots (due to your plan limitations).
- B. Finish study – you can finish the study whenever you want (regardless of whether all tester slots are filled). You will still be able to access this Study Dashboard, but no more testers will be allowed to participate in studies. However, it’s possible to restart your study at any time – the test URL will not change, so you’ll be able to invite more users to test your items.
- C. Tester counter – shows how many testers’ results you already have.
- D. Participation link – this is the link to take part in the study. All you need to do is to copy that and sent it to your testers.
- E. Study summary – shows study settings that you’ve made; there’s also a button to download the CSV file,
- F. Recordings – here you can all testers’ recordings of their gaze and cursor movement (click on one to see it).
- G. Heatmaps – click on an item to see its heatmap (read more on Analyzing data)