Eye tracking in usability
With recent advancements in technology and the need of understanding what users really want from a website, many companies have already giving the services of generating heat maps, recording the pupil dilation, trace maps etc. Just after I have joined where I am currently working now, our company bought the state of the art eye tracker Tobii T60. Since then, we have been trying to understand what could be the most beneficial in terms of finding usability problems by using this. Well, it is very easy to say ‘hey you can see from the heat map where users were looking for a long time’, but what does it actually mean? I once went to a workshop ran by Russ from the City College and he mentioned to be cautious when interpreting the eye tracking data. I completely agree with him. If someone is looking at a billboard for a long time, it can mean two things: either he is attracted by the beautiful scenario or he is confused by that scenario what the billboard is trying to sell!
Okay I agree that you can get more than the heat maps by using eye tracker. I remember working on a project where the task was to find something which was just on the right side of a navigational page. Most of the testers failed to achieve this goal. When we were telling our clients that the link of getting that information is on the wrong place, we easily backed our comments by showing the eye tracking data! Hey- you know sometimes you need to show where the users are looking to make them believe!
Another cool thing you can do with eye tracking is the live viewing. When we do an observed testing session (where our clients observe from the other side of the one way mirror), we start the live viewer to display the tracking on the monitors on the observation room. This by far shows the reaction of the clients when the testers are not looking what the clients thought quite ‘obvious’ to see. I think this also helps them understand what are the things they really need to consider improving as soon as possible!
My recent task was to find a way to make live viewing possible over the Internet. At first I was struggling to find this solution. One of the IT consultancy company quoted us around 5000 euros to give this solution. Well, I have found a better one and free of cost! I was quite delighted when I came up with this solution. I have tested it and it worked quite fine.
It does improve the quality of testing by providing more insights when you use eye tracker. But be cautious when you are trying to interpret the eye tracking data.
Tags: eye tracking, Web usability
