The Eye Tracker allows Cyber-Duck’s consultancy and production divisions to dramatically enhance usability, conversion rates and ultimately ROI using features such as Gaze Plots, Retrospective Think-Aloud, and Areas of Interest.

The Tobii eye tracker looks like a normal computer screen

Research at Harvard Business School by Professor Gerald Zaltman found that at least 95% of all human behaviour is subconscious; eye tracking allows us to see what users are really thinking before they make the click. Traditional ‘think aloud’ methods rely on people verbalising their actions – something that isn’t really possible with subconscious behaviour.

To get the most out of eye tracking it’s critical to capture natural interaction without disrupting the user. Danny Bluestone, Cyber-Duck’s CEO adds: “We use Retrospective Talk Aloud to record audio-visual input from the user after the task to gain further feedback on problematic areas of the interface”. For example, if a user failed to accept a friend request we would then replay the video to that individual and ask them to talk about their difficulty with the task. When combined with the eye trackers gaze data, the feedback video provides valuable insight to enhance decision-making.

By bringing in an in-house Eye Tracker, Cyber-Duck will enhance website, mobile and SaaS (Software as a Service) user experiences, saving clients substantial amounts of time throughout the development lifecycle. Khaled Weir, Cyber-Duck’s Web Strategist adds: “We have been using eye tracking since 2008 with much success and we are now privileged to be one of the only digital agencies in the world utilising eye tracking in-house. Our clients, who develop both web 2.0 websites, mobile apps and SaaS can benefit from Cyber-Duck’s eye tracking at a fraction of the cost”.

Danny and Khal present the in-house eye tracker

Cyber-Duck firmly believe that in order to obtain intelligent decision-making with eye tracking, it is imperative to use fully qualified ‘hands-on’ user centred design practitioners who are best suited to make critical project recommendations. Cyber-Duck utilise the eye tracker from the creative, and wireframing phases all the way to ongoing usability analysis and competitor benchmarking.

The eye tracker was purchased from Acuity, Tobii’s exclusive eye tracking distributor in the UK. Jon Ward, Director at Acuity, mentions: “We identified Cyber-Duck as a leader and pioneer in User Centred Design and were impressed with their methodology. We feel that their in-house eye tracker will compliment their UCD (User Centred Design) process dramatically”

Wednesday was an eventful day at Cyber-Duck as we launched OfficeCavalry’s sign up page. All registrants are entered into a free prize draw to win an iPad or iPhone. Going live in September OfficeCavalry is an exciting website connecting freelancers and project owners.

Also on Wednesday, Matt, Khal & Clément were conducting eye-tracking and focus groups in St. Albans, testing the usability of a website we are creating for the European Union. The day was a great success and we are looking forward to improving the website based on user comments.

Some of the team have become addicted to Glue this week, Glue has the potential to be the latest social networking craze, in which you build a library of your favourite TV shows, movies, music, books and more. As you ‘like’ items, the system makes recommendations and awards your achievements in the form of stickers. We think it’s an interesting concept but time will tell if it gains popularity with the masses.

Old Spice guy ‘Isaiah Mustafa’ has starred in a series of ads attempting to re-invent Old Spice’s brand image. The ads will be remembered as one of the most successful viral marketing campaigns in recent years. Last week they gained further traction by responding to questions tweeted to him by fans such as this one for Kevin Rose.

The (annoyingly) good-looking Mustafa has now ‘hung up his towel’, resulting in a number of parodies including our favourite from OhDoctah.

Last but definitely not least, we wish Siji (our intern) a Happy Birthday. He has been a great addition to the team during his time here so far and to show our appreciation everyone chipped in to buy him a giant sausage roll…and a bottle of Jack Daniels.

That’s all for this week, but join us next week when we will have plenty more to talk about.

Due to his relentless  levels of dedication, Matt won the Cyber-Duck World Cup fantasy football league. The rest of us felt the hour long victory dance around the office was a tad excessive though.

Some of the team dedicated their entire Saturday to research and development on location based applications, Gowalla and Foursquare. What troopers! Apparently they lost their notes in ‘The Worlds End’ pub though.

Clément has been looking at various augmented reality techniques, producing ‘magical’ teapots and globes on his screen at any given moment. We’re not sure how this is going to help anyone yet but it certainly is cool to watch.

The company vision poster now has pride of place in the office. Everyone at Cyber-Duck has signed the poster to signify that we all share the company vision and are united together to ensure that we reach our goal of becoming ‘The Leading Independent Digital Agency in 2011’.

Dan R Signing the Cyber-Duck Vision Poster

Remember that exciting new project from a few weeks ago? Well let’s just say it’s almost ready to be submitted to Apple for approval! As ever, we’ll keep you updated!

Our latest Communicator Award arrived to top up our collection for 2010. The award was presented to us for the BoonSpace project. If you haven’t already seen the site, you should check it out here.

The guys at Knight Group loved their new site Knight Precision Wire, so much that they have commissioned us for a second site in their group, ‘Omega Wire’. The team have started work on the design this week, so look out for it soon.

Finally, you should look out for the OfficeCavalry.com pre-registration site, which is due to be launched any moment!

Thanks for reading – there should be a lot more to talk about next week as usual…

Khal and Paolo tried some eye tracking glasses which can monitor what you are looking at wherever you are! That could be very dangerous!

Danny, Jerome and Matt have been at the ‘New Designers’ show, and have been really impressed with the level of talent there this year. Last night they presented the ‘Cyber-Duck Associate Prize’ to the best digital project at the show – SlopeScope. The guy behind it is Pablo de la Peña, a first class graduate from the University of Dundee. SlopeScope is ‘a conceptual service for snowboarders which allows passive recording from multiple angles on a slope’ and we absolutely loved the innovation and techniques behind it. Take a look at the SlopeScope website if you’re interested in finding out more about the project.

Some of the Cyber-Duck Team with Pablo, our prize winner at the New Designers Show

The team were equally impressed with Ross Forrest’s ‘Zoom’ project which demonstrated an enthusiasts social network and how a folksonomy based navigation system delivers a ‘journey’ based user experience. Calum Pringle’s ‘Subtle Subtitle’ project was fascinating. He clearly demonstrated (using an iphone prototype) how a mobile device can help people with speech impairments with the potential of transforming peoples lives.

Tom, Khal and Paolo have been ‘researching’ location-based mobile applications Gowalla and Foursquare with their incessant ‘checking in’ to places as exciting as Tesco and Greggs. If you have no idea what I’m talking about, you should read this from Khal’s blog…we think it’s going to be the next big thing!

Some more great news…Chris and Sajith finished their masters degrees and have officially become the 2 cleverest people in the office! Well done to them (and thanks for the beer).

First of all we’ve launched 2 top class websites this week; Permits2Work and Knight Precision Wire. As ever, the team involved has put every effort in to make these some of the best looking, most functional sites you will find on the Internet today!

Danny and Khal have been out working on a very interesting usability testing and eyetracking project for a client at a lab in London.

The new Wisteria Formations YouTube channel has launched with 10 episodes on how to form a limited company in the UK. They’re in a brilliant stop motion illustrated format – definitely worth a look!

We’re giving away free VIP tickets to the New Designers show this week. The show is designed to showcase graduate talent from around the country and allow networking between them, potential employers and the media. We’ve only got limited numbers of tickets so you’ll need to be fast!

A cool tool we found this week is LaunchList. The idea of it is to provide a simple checklist for launching a new website – a really neat, simple and original solution to a problem.

We have also launched a brand new blog ‘Office Partitioning Expert’ sponsored by Optima Systems, which will provide expert news and information on the Office Partitioning industry.

To finish off we are proud to say that Chris Job is now a full time Web Developer at Cyber-Duck – officially joining the ducks! It’s great to welcome him into the team on a permanent basis, he’s brilliant at what he does and we’re excited about keeping him on board.

The New Designers event brings together over 3,500 graduates from the best design related courses across the country to the Business Design Centre in London. The purpose of the event is to allow these graduates to meet with potential employers and the media to exhibit their work.

New Designers is a great way to meet talented individuals whilst also offering a chance to network with top companies from around the U.K, and we want to invite you to come along to visit us. You need to be fast though, we only have 20 VIP tickets and we doubt they will be around for long!

Cyber-Duck’s clients can get free tickets.

EDIT: Event now over. Thanks to those of you who came along!

We couldn’t write this week without mentioning the football, well done England you finally pulled it out of the bag. All they need to do now is to beat Germany, Argentina and Brazil.

If you’re interested in design, you will want to read this article Danny wrote for the BIMA blog this week on ‘Design by Community’. The article is centred around the idea of basing a design on the exact things that the user wants to see. We think we’re going to see a lot more of this in action in the coming months and years, leading on from the user feedback trend using tools like uservoice.

Apple really are having an exciting time aren’t they? Khal was at the local o2 shop at 6am on launch day for his upgrade! 4 hours later he came back to the office with a grin on his face and an iPhone 4 in his hand, and was promptly pounced on by the rest of the Cyber-Duck staff; all hoping to get a glimpse. He seems pretty satisfied with it, and we’re all really impressed with the increased resolution, speed and gyroscope.

To celebrate this launch at Cyber-Duck we’re planning to launch a cool new app in the next few weeks. We’ll be sure to keep you posted on the details.

Another exciting piece of news from the office is that we’ve been trialling an eye-tracking device which will soon be a permanent fixture for in-house use. The device will allow us to test designs and wireframes for levels of usability by asking users to perform tasks and seeing how their eyes interact with the page when attempting them. The resulting analytical data from the eye and mouse activity will allow us to perform detailed analysis of websites during the usability stage so that we can make the user experience as well optimised as possible in the final version.

As for what to look out for next week, we are going to be at the ‘New Designers’ event at the Business Design Centre in London. The event is designed to allow new graduates to exhibit their work to high-end employers and the media. Keep your eye out for some more information this week on the blog, we’ll see you then.

This week saw the launch of the iPhone app we created for our clients Wisteria. The app is a Tax Calculator which allows users to easily calculate how much tax is payable on their salary, VAT, capital gains, inheritance tax, and student loans in the UK. The app is available now and free to download at the iTunes store.

In the red corner we have Sole Traders, In the Blue Corner we have Ltd Companies. This week marks the launch of our latest web creation on behalf of our clients Wisteria Formations. The microsite uses a vintage boxing poster theme to explain the pros and cons of someone setting up a new company as a sole trader compared to a Ltd company.

Each week we try and find a topical and interesting viral to delight you with. This week the BP Spills Coffee video came to our attention. Posted to Youtube on the 9th of June this comedy video poking fun at BP’s handling of the catastrophic oil spill has already received 4,324,525 views.

And finally, as World Cup Fever grips the nation our office rivalry is getting increasingly intense with the lead constantly changing at the top of our Metro Fantasy Football table. Congratulations go to the ultra-competitive Matt who is currently top with 856 points, but hot on his tail is Sylvain with 804 points.

That’s it for this week. Have a great weekend!

Half of Cyber-Duck have sometimes willingly been setting up their fantasy football teams this week. Some might say that not everyone has taken it seriously, but hey; who’s to say that Honduras won’t pull it out of the bag? We also got some really cool movie posters through based on the ducks – see them on our Facebook group.

Apple fans rejoiced (again) with the announcement of the new iPhone, ‘iPhone 4’ at WWDC by Steve Jobs. It seems that everyone now wants one; even hard-core Blackberry fans (although they might not admit it).

We all enjoyed this Adidas Star Wars viral video too. Whoever would have thought the two would combine so well?

We received our office iPad and everyone has managed to get some enjoyment out of it, but we’re still not going to be buying our own individual ones just yet with the minimum £429 price tag.

Sajith, one of our developers has created a really useful debugging tool – for more details see his blog

Most have returned from Danny’s wedding in Tel Aviv, with tans (or burnt). We’ve heard all the stories; it seems a good time was had by all. Some more than others!!

That’s it for this week. Have a great weekend!

Already this year we have been awarded a prestigious ‘Best in Class’ Award at the Interactive Media Awards, along with being nominated as ‘finalists for Best E-business’ in the recent FSB Awards. Our success can be extended further by the news that we have won not one, but two much sought after Communicator Awards.

The Communicator Awards are well established within the media communications industry 16 years of running. They are sanctioned and judged by the International Academy of the Visual Arts, attracting companies and agencies worldwide. This year over 7,000 entries were received including entries from the likes of Accenture, T-Mobile and Hilton Hotels. We submitted our client website ‘Boonspace.com’ to the Interactive category and were pleasantly surprised to have won in two sub-categories; ‘Websites-Social/Networking’, and ‘Websites-Visual Appeal’.

In both categories we won The Award of Excellence – the highest possible acclamation. Full credit for this award should be giving to the team members that worked extremely hard on this project to produce yet another aesthetically pleasing, award-winning website.

We are now half way through 2010 and if we can maintain the momentum for the remainder of the year then not only will we have to build a bigger trophy cabinet, but Cyber-Duck’s credentials as a leading Digital Agency will be stronger than ever.