It's a given that a business needs to be on the web. But if the company's site isn't clear, direct and easy to understand, it's not going to accomplish its goal of getting new customers or subscribers. That's where Feng-Gui, a Rehovot company that specializes in "computational attention science," comes in.

 

Feng-Gui (the name is a cyber-takeoff of the famous Chinese feng-shui system of aesthetics) was established with two goals: one, to help businesses build a better, more successful website to help them ring up sales; and two, to make the online world a prettier place, says CEO Rafael Mizrahi.

 

"I've always had this desire to make things more aesthetic looking," says Mizrahi. And now, with Feng-Gui, he's taken on the considerable job of fixing up the worldwide web. "There's a lot of clutter out there," he says. "Many sites have too many competing elements on them, with users unclear as to what they are supposed to do - and as a result they end up doing nothing, leaving the site without taking the appropriate action."

 

Feng-Gui uses advanced algorithms to determine where the human eye would most likely focus on a web page or an ad. The system will alert designers if a button users are supposed to click is placed too close to a bold visual that draws their attention away. And if the site's primary funding comes from selling ads, advertisers will be reassured that their ad won't get lost in the clutter, and be more willing to part with their ad budget money.

 

"Designers can use Feng-Gui to optimize the layout of a webpage, along with its buttons and banners, identify weak spots within an ad and improve its performance, improve the location of brand and branding effectiveness, or retarget, crop and resize a photo aesthetically," Mizrahi says.

 

 

It's often a real challenge for designers to set up a web page with all the required elements - images, disclaimers, links - while guiding users to make a purchase, click on a link, sign up for an e-mail newsletter, etc. For businesses that rely on the web for sales - or "conversions," as they are called in web sales circles - it's a matter of dollars and cents because users aren't going to keep surfing on a site that's too difficult to understand or too confusing to look at.

 

One tactic used by many ad agencies is to gather a focus group and measure what they look at when they view a website, using a tool called eye-tracking. The system measures where the eye is looking, how far it strays from a target and how long it lingers on an element. It's effective, but expensive and time consuming.

 

Thanks to Feng-Gui, designers, ad agencies and website owners can instead use virtual eye tracking, which provides results with a 70 percent accuracy rate as compared to real-time eye tracking, but at a fraction of the cost and hassle. Established in 2006, the company's more than 600 customers include advertising giants such as McCann Erickson and WSI Marketing.

 

"Instead of spending over $1,000 and wasting a whole day with a focus group, designers can use our service for just a few dollars and get excellent results," points out Mizrahi, who explains that computational attention science uses mathematical analytics to figure out how people view anything from events to movies. "It has applications in many areas, including security and defense, but I decided to try and do something with this to help improve the user experience on websites, and help designers build more effective - and aesthetic-looking - sites," says Mizrahi.

 

The company is self-funded and currently has five employees, but Mizrahi expects to continue growing. "Our service can help website owners make more money," he says, and maybe even more importantly, "help website users have a better experience, with things looking 'just right.'"