Eye Tracking and Usability: Which Metrics Are Valuable?
A few articles we’ve recently done at Eye Tracking Update have focused on the cost and effectiveness of eye tracking for usability studies. There’s a lot of debate on the subject of course, but assuming you’ve decided that eye tracking works for you, you may be somewhere along the lines of choosing which metrics to use. Or maybe you’re not choosing, but thinking you need to see all of them in order to gain insight into how a user uses a website.
Well, as we’ve written in some of our recent posts, excessive data from eye tracking studies can lead to an incredibly overwhelming amount of information to sift through after your eye tracking study is complete. One article we found tries to narrow down a few metrics specific to usability studies, so you don’t have to incorporate everything all at once.
One useful metric to use is Time to First Fixation. It takes time for a participant to first fixate on a specific area of interest, and taken on its own, this metric apparently doesn’t reveal a whole lot. But when compared to other areas of interest, the Time to First Fixation can show you which elements of the page are drawing users’ attention in context of a particular task they are asked to perform. Elements of the page may be completely unrelated to completing a task and this metric allows you to see if those are competing or making it difficult to complete the task.
Another metric is Mouse Click Count. Mouse Click Count is mainly helpful when looking at the paths that users take from a single decision point within the interface. If a study participant is given a task to find a specific piece of information, where do users then first click? If a user interacts with faceted navigation, which elements, then, do they click on most? The eye tracker’s ability to record this data provides valuable data in conjunction with other eye tracking metrics and findings.
The key is to use the various metrics on combination, and from that you can learn something useful about the site. The article mentions the recent metric additions, like visit duration and visit count, two measurements which could prove useful in determining the quality of user experience on a website. Other metrics, it says, may have benefits in context of specific goals of a usability study – so make sure to always consider the data elements available when performing eye tracking analysis.
Eyetracking Metrics for Usability Studies
Related articles:
- Which Eye Tracking Metrics Are Best In Usability Testing?
- How Do You Know Which Eye Tracking Metrics To Use?
- Mastering Eye Tracking Web Usability Metrics
- Framework for Eye Tracking Patterns and Usability Problems: Pt 3
- Is Eye Tracking for Usability Studies Worth the Trouble?
- Framework for Eye Tracking Patterns and Usability Problems: Pt 4
- The Latest in Eye Tracking Web Usability Research pt2
- The Latest in Eye Tracking Web Usability Research pt1
- Eye Tracking: Facebook and LinkedIn Usability
- Framework for Eye Tracking Patterns and Usability Problems: Part 1