erickookoo

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

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...)

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.

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. =)