Launch HN: Hawkeye – Learn where people look in your products
Everyone knows understanding user behavior is essential to improving products. As recent success stories like Superhuman and Notion have shown, good design is everywhere these days. This means it’s more important than ever to get actionable insights into how people use your products.
However, existing research tools could be a lot better. One option is event-based analytics and always-on screen recorders, but these services only show you which pages the user visits and what actions they perform. Another approach is conducting narrated studies with paid participants. These sessions give you a huge amount of information, but can become boring to watch and often aren’t representative of real users.
Hawkeye takes a different approach to user research. Using the TrueDepth camera on iOS devices, Hawkeye lets you track where people look in your products without the need for any extra hardware. This gives you a far better understanding of the user’s thought process than traditional screen recordings. You can see where they get confused, what grabs their attention, and begin to understand why they perform the actions they do.
Today, we’re excited to launch the Hawkeye testing platform. Right off the bat, you can test any mobile website or InVision prototype, with more test types coming soon. The platform lets you invite participants to complete tests on their own devices and makes it easy to play back screen recordings and view heatmaps from your product.
This is just the start of what we have planned. Zooming out a bit, we believe providing automated, yet deeper insights into user experience can make it far easier for anyone to improve their products.
You can sign up for free at https://usehawkeye.com. We'd love to hear your feedback and I'm happy to answer any and all questions! Feel free to reach out in the comments or shoot an email to matt@usehawkeye.com. Thanks everyone!