A few months ago, we ran a study of Google Places on the desk­top with our eye track­ing tech­nol­ogy and recorded where peo­ple looked on the com­puter screen, and also mapped where they clicked. From our research, we made rec­om­men­da­tions about what busi­nesses need to do to get the most from a Google Places listing.

As a follow-up to that research, we decided to try the same tasks on a mobile device: in this case, an Apple iPhone using the free Google Places app.

We used twelve par­tic­i­pants: an even num­ber of female and male par­tic­i­pants, rang­ing in age from 21 to 45.

Every par­tic­i­pant was given the same sce­nario – an imag­i­nary road trip with stops in Hamil­ton, Lon­don, Win­nipeg, and Edmon­ton with the task of choos­ing a place for a friend to get a tat­too in each of those cities based on the Google Places search results.

Par­tic­i­pants entered their own search term. Most par­tic­i­pants used either “Hamil­ton tat­toos” or “tat­toos in Hamilton”.

We noticed that on an iPhone, par­tic­i­pants would some­times scroll fur­ther down the list­ings than they did on a desk­top com­puter envi­ron­ment, for two reasons:

1. There is con­sid­er­ably less space on an iPhone screen com­pared to a com­puter screen, so only three com­plete list­ings can be seen at once on an iPhone.
2. The iPhone inter­face makes it easy to scroll up and down.

Peo­ple typ­i­cally start look­ing in the upper left part of the screen, scan from left to right, then move down to the next result, and scan from left to right again. How­ever, given the small space of the iPhone screen, some peo­ple will have their atten­tion pulled to the right to look at an image, and may con­tinue a scan down to the next image, before resum­ing a left-to-right scan pat­tern. In the tat­too study, peo­ple looked at images to deter­mine if the busi­ness looked trust­wor­thy. The images clicked were split between store­fronts or images of tat­too work.

If they start scrolling down, then their gaze will stay on the left side until they hit a list­ing of inter­est. In our study, list­ings that had at least 3+ star reviews took 41 out of 47 clicks. Rat­ings and reviews were the most impor­tant fac­tor in cap­tur­ing visual atten­tion and clicks.

To learn more about Google Places on the iPhone and our find­ings, down­load the study.


Biography / Resume : Ian is the Manager of User Experience & Research at Mediative, helping clients optimize the online experience for their potential customers. He manages several key accounts and leads the company’s ongoing research projects to better understand search, buyer behaviour, mobile, and user experience. With a background in neuroscience, web design and eye tracking, Ian brings an invaluable knowledge of human behaviour and human-computer interaction to his position at Mediative. He plays a key role in many of the company’s SEO projects and lends his expertise to the strategy development of both PPC and display advertising projects. Ultimately, Ian believes that success in digital marketing comes down to two things: being found and being good. So he works with clients to make they tick both boxes and establish a successful and lasting presence online.