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Framework for Eye Tracking Patterns and Usability Problems: Part 1

Posted on Jul 8, 2010 | 0 comments

Framework for Eye Tracking Patterns and Usability Problems: Part 1 When you are trying a new product, you want it to work, right? If a company makes a good product, people use it. If it’s a bad product, people will not – it’s quite simple. Of course there are several factors like strategy, marketing, money, connections, production, and even a little luck involved in making a successful product but in essence, what it really comes down to is whether the product is a good one or not.

The onslaught of the World Wide Web in the last decade has certainly made for an exciting time in regard to new innovations and outlets for consumers to explore. The Internet is actually a product in itself – and judging by the immense growth in its short history, it’s a pretty successful one.

There are, however, a few aspects of the Internet that do not work, and a sort of Darwinian evolution could be responsible for websites that make the cut and the ones left behind. Web users do not tolerate poor usability – lead them to something that doesn’t work, and they will soon move on. This increasing interest in usability optimisation has led to the use of eye tracking to monitor how users interact with a site and navigate from page to page. The increase in eye tracking, in particular, has been stimulated in part by what’s known as the “eye-mind hypotheses”, a principle formulated by two researchers (Just and Carpenter) which assumes that what a person is looking at indicates what they are thinking about or attending to at the moment. Many studies show a connection between a user’s eye tracking patterns and decision-making process, but even with this increase in eye tracking usability tests, no concrete correlation scheme has been established to link eye tracking with an accurate interpretation of users’ actions – it’s all based on analysis and opinion.

As a result, a pair of British researchers are of the opinion that if eye tracking is to become a serious tool in evaluating the usability of websites (and other things, we might add), it’s necessary to move beyond the anecdotal, opinionated interpretations and create a more rigorous evaluation scheme. And so, researchers Claudia Ehmke and Stephanie Wilson of the Centre for HCI Design at City University in London have set out to establish an initial framework to correlate eye tracking patterns and usability problems.

In the next article, we’ll go over the specifics of their research and take a look at some of the insights gained throughout.

Identifying Web Usability Problems from Eye-Tracking Data

Framework for Eye Tracking Patterns and Usability Problems: Part 1

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