AOI stands for Area of Interest - a key concept in eye-tracking research and analysis. It refers to specific, predefined regions within a visual stimulus (like a website, advertisement, product packaging, or image) that researchers or analysts want to track and analyze user visual attention on.
Why Use AOIs?
When you're analyzing a website, ad, or any kind of visual material, you're probably not interested in every pixel. Areas Of Interest allow researchers to:
- Select the meaningful content: Rather than analyzing raw gaze data across an entire screen, AOIs let you focus on specific elements like a call-to-action button, logo, headline, or product.
- Compare user behavior: By defining multiple AOIs, you can see which areas attract the most attention, how long users look at them, and in what sequence.
- Quantify engagement: AOIs help turn qualitative observations into measurable metrics, such as:
- Visual Attention IndexTM: Normalized score ranging from 0%-100% evaluating the effectiveness of the AOI.
- Time to First Fixation: How quickly users looked at the AOI.
- Ratio: The percentage of participants who fixated on the AOI.
Every AOI starts with a hypothesis: Will users notice this element? Will they ignore that one? Use AOIs to put those hypotheses to the test. Learn more here: The importance of hypotheses.
How AOIs Work in RealEye?
Defining AOIs in RealEye is simple and intuitive. After running your eye-tracking test - whether it's on an image, video, or live website - you’ll move into the Results in the Analytcis Dashboard. This is where you can draw AOIs over your visual content, decide which eye-tracking metrics you want to view, and finally compare them using our AOI Reports!
💡NOTE: A gaze/fixation is considered part of an AOI if it starts within the AOI's time range.
One of the first things you'll do is set the time range during which your AOI is visible on the screen. This is especially important for video stimuli, where elements often appear and disappear over time. RealEye helps by defaulting the start of this range to 0.5 seconds to account for something called Central Fixation Bias, where participants tend to initially fixate near the center of the screen. You can easily adjust the time range using the orange slider under the heatmap - just drag the ends to focus on specific moments of interest.
When it comes to actually drawing your AOIs, you have flexibility: use either rectangles or freeform shapes (polygnos), depending on what fits your content best. If you're working with a website, you can assign AOIs directly to HTML elements. Learn more about AOI Mapping on embedded websites here: Embedded Website.
Need to track multiple parts of the same element? No problem. RealEye allows you to group multiple shapes into a single AOI. Just create the initial one, then add more parts as needed by clicking "Add AOI Part" button. All the associated metrics will be calculated for the group as a whole.
Once you've defined your AOIs, RealEye automatically processes data within those areas. All metrics - like fixations, gaze duration, time to first fixation, and more - are calculated. These AOIs can be renamed, deleted, and you can copy and import them between different items, which might be especially useful if you’re testing similar layouts or versions.
And when it’s time to compare performance, the AOI Report gives you a clear side-by-side view of how each area performed in capturing attention. You can download the report either as a CSV file for further analysis or as a PDF for easy sharing and presentation.
💌 If you have any questions or need further assistance, feel free to reach out to our team at contact@realeye.io