The experience of an Air Force pilot pulling 3Gs and a user navigating a website are more alike than you might think.

So says Raj Gopal Prasad Kantamneni, a senior research manager with Yahoo! and the holder of a master’s degree in human factors engineering from Wright State University.

Prasad will be in Dayton on Wednesday, May 26, to deliver a keynote address, “Balancing User Experience and Revenue: Using Data to Make Product Design Decisions” at Technology First’s forward-looking conference, Technology Landscape 2013.

Prasad may also say something about his desire to create a human perceptions center of excellence in Sunnyvale, Calif., Yahoo’s corporate home, with the help of WSU faculty.

For five years, Prasad, 35, has studied how Internet users choose websites. Using eye-movement tracking equipment, he tries to determine what captures their interest and when that interest wanes and why.

He rejects the idea that user experience and revenue can be separated in designing sites. A site that pulls users in, he contends, will make money.

Internet surfers often make decisions about what piques their interest in the first “250 milliseconds” of visiting a site, Prasad said. That’s why he compares the Web surfing experience to piloting: Pilots make life-or-death decisions as quickly.

“The stakes are different, but the underlying behaviors are the same,” Prasad said.

Prasad said he hopes to convince WSU faculty members to join him in establishing a center of excellence studying such questions.