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Is Eye Tracking for Usability Studies Worth the Trouble?

Is Eye Tracking for Usability Studies Worth the Trouble? Despite many advancing eye tracking technologies, there are still naysayers that continually challenge the industry with fair questions. One question: Is eye tracking worth it?

It’s easy to get excited about eye tracking and the ability to see where people look while they’re using a website. It sounds like an incredible opportunity to gain insight into the user experience and a window into what the user is thinking. Eye tracking, of course, is quite expensive when not done in a DIY manner, and the software and instruments often require extra effort and specialized knowledge. What can we actually learn from heat maps? An article published last year asks these questions and makes for an interesting point: many who use eye tracking find it is actually not that easy to know what to do with the data, how to analyze the visualizations and make conclusions from them.

So what does eye tracking actually show us? According to the article posted on UXMatters, a site dedicated to “Insights and inspiration for the user experience community,” eye tracking detects where a person fovea fixates and the movements between those fixations. The fovea provides us with the sharpest area of focus, our fine, detailed vision. And our eyes dart to and fro in rapid bursts called saccades. When they stop, that’s a fixation. We use our peripheral vision – our parafovea – to determine where to focus next.

Eye tracking heat maps show us the saccades and fixations using, typically, an infrared light bounced off the eye, which detects the angle of reflection. From that, we can deduce where a person’s fovea is aiming.

Through the study of saccades and fixations, eye tracking can provide insight into potential usability problems – data from which we can make observations about why a person looks at a certain spot. The data, when used in a supplementary way, can help determine why participants in a usability study had problems performing a task, where participants expected to find certain elements, and whether participants noticed a particular element, such as a link, button, advertisement, or something new added to a user interface.

It can show whether elements are distracting in a negative way, how efficiently a design guides participants through a task, and whether there are differences in task performance by user group – for example, between new users and experienced users.

We’ll cover more ways in which eye tracking can help in the next article.

Eyetracking: Is It Worth It?

Is Eye Tracking for Usability Studies Worth the Trouble?

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