[IxDA Discuss] Eye tracking, how valuable is it?

[Todd Warfel]

Eye tracking doesn't tell us much beyond where and how they scan a  
page. There is a lot more to human behavior than that.

Eye tracking is only one piece of the puzzle. When I was at Cornell,  
we built an HCI lab that had eye tracking software. We used it to  
look at large commerce and content driven sites to track vision  
patterns. And that was great for seeing where users/visitors/ 
consumers were scanning the screen as well as what areas they were  
either avoiding, or not spending too much time on. Incidentally, the  
woman who was the resident expert on the eye tracking software at  
Cornell now works at Google in their eye tracking lab.

It didn't tell us what they were selecting and why. Eye tracking  
won't tell you that someone clicked a drop down menu scrolled it for  
a couple of seconds and found it confusing. But video recording and  
an observing moderator will. The heat maps are pretty and impressive.  
And the software we had could do 3D topo mapping of the data, which  
was also impressive. But that only told us where to go back to the  
screens and look and try and figure out why whatever was happening  
was happening.

What I'm still waiting for is eye tracking mashed up with click  
through data from something like Omniture. Now, that will tell us  
what they spend time on visually, or ignore, as well as what they are  
actually exploring physically. Eye tracking on its own is only  
minimally useful. But combine it with log analysis and screen  
recording and you've got something very powerful. Yes, I know, that's  
very difficult, as it's not realistic to fit 10,000 customers with  
eye tracking equipment, but I can still dream.

 From the field
We have a client right now who's undergoing a redesign. They can't  
figure out for the life of them why their promos for signing up new  
customers aren't working. They've tried changing locations, size, and  
graphical treatment. They've decided to use eye tracking studies to  
find out where customers look most often. They find a few studies on- 
line and determine they should put it in the areas the customer looks  
most often. Unfortunately, that's where they already have it.

We let them know that eye tracking is only one piece of the puzzle.  
They need to also consider the free promotional item they're offering  
(is it of value to your customers?), the size, the colours, the  
visual treatment, and what else is around it. They're emphasizing  
everything on the page. And by emphasizing everything, you emphasize  
nothing.


On Jul 5, 2006, at 6:53 AM, Ischai Cohen wrote:

> I found it very valuable, since the eye is the focus of the user
> attention and the gateway to her behavior. We can track mouse  
> movement,
> but it says nothing about how the user sees and understands the
> information.


Cheers!

Todd R. Warfel
Partner, Design & Usability Specialist
Messagefirst | designing and usability consulting
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