Show HN: ResMaps – See who is viewing your resume and what they are looking at | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: ResMaps – See who is viewing your resume and what they are looking at

resmaps.com

Here are some examples of some of the heatmaps that were generated today from people looking at my portfolio page. In the first two you can definitely see specific things that the viewer was looking at - again based on cursor movement: http://i.imgur.com/sa0r3hG.jpg http://i.imgur.com/698ia8K.jpg

That said, there were also a lot of users who simply scrolled quickly down the page. It's a lot more difficult to tell where these users paid attention to. In this specific case, they probably didn't really read anything in particular and just quickly scrolled down to see what was there: http://i.imgur.com/61nkjNz.jpg

> ResMaps lets you to create a sleek web resume that captures where viewers spend the most time looking.

What viewers are looking at is not the same as what hiring managers are looking at, which may make the results misleading in a real-world scenario.

I'm much more skeptical about the "use mouse movements as a proxy for eye gaze" part. For non-interactive elements like text blocks, cursor location has a NEGATIVE correlation with eye gaze (because users will often move the cursor out of the way of what they're reading). I would completely disregard any data that comes out of this.

One way to potentially address this problem: dim out most of the page except a 200-300px diameter circle where the cursor is located. Force the user to use the cursor as a "spotlight" so they can read the resume. This allows you to see where they look & what catches/holds their attention. It's a wholly unnatural way to read, but should serve your particular purpose.

You're correct about users not hovering over exactly where they are reading in order not to block their view with the cursor, but studies have shown that people do position their cursor very close to or just below where they are actually reading (there are, however, also other usage patterns such as the scroller who simply leaves his cursor in one place and scrolls down the page).

We've allowed users to create links to their projects in order to make would normally be non-interactive text blocks on a resume into something clickable.

There is plenty of literature that correlates eye gaze to cursor movement (e.g. http://scholar.google.com/citations?view_op=view_citation&hl...)

Something I thought of coming home from a birthday dinner this afternoon:

In order to get a better idea of what the viewer is focusing on, you might consider going to a vertical gradient instead of a pointer heat-map.

Most people don't read to the bottom of the page before they start scrolling. Imagine two lines on the screen- the bottom line is the point at which the viewer will begin to scroll. The top line is the point that the viewer wants their reading area to be located. The space in between the lines is your "target" area.

As the viewer scrolls down the page, you could average their scrolling speed, and increment the intensity for that area of the heat map only when they slow their scrolling speed drastically, or go back over an area.

Just from paying attention to my own scrolling habits, I think the top line would probably be just above the horizontal center of the screen, and the bottom line would probably be about an inch down. You could do some testing to find the average line positions.

This is true, but usually you can tell who is visiting based on where you have sent your resume and city, network of the visitor.

Not what I meant. Ideally a user would submit their resume to test where hiring managers might looks when they submit their own resume to them via the hiring company's own process. In that case, the test vs. actual behavior will differ.

Part of the reason we built this is because applying online nowadays is like a black hole and a lot of times you never know the status of your application.

With this, at least you'd be able to know when anyone actually looked at it. Based on how much interest they showed, you could probably make an educated guess as to whether they were interested or not. Basically, at least you get some feedback.

I actually applied to a couple of jobs to test it and had some interesting results. For example, in one interview there was much more mouse-hovering/interest focused around my front-end development skills as opposed to UX. Similarly, I could see what projects they clicked on and during the interview, they did ask about those. It is reasonably helpful for interview prep.

There were some people that just printed out the resume though, so I wasn't able to get any data with them.

Any plan to allow PDF resumes, or is there a technical hurdle at the moment? Most people keep their resume as a word or latex document which they then render into a PDF file, reentering this information one form field at a time can become a bit tedious.

Besides the convenience factor of not having to reenter information, PDF resumes have layouts and fonts which play into reader perceptions (rightly or wrongly). I will argue that the information layout is just as important as the information itself, and affects "where" and "what" resume readers look at first/second/.../never. Please consider allowing PDF resume viewing and analysis.

Yeah, this is something we've definitely thought of implementing. Definitely agree with you that some people have awesome-looking resumes that they have spent a lot of time formatting (we both graduated with HCI degrees, so we've seen a lot of amazing resumes from UX and graphic designers).

But yeah, mostly technical hurdles at this point. Maybe someday. =)

Hi HN! We use mouse movements as a proxy for eye gaze to show you what visitors have been looking at on your resume. Give it a spin and let us know what you think.

"Please resend as a PDF or Word Document."

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