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How Do You Know Which Eye Tracking Metrics To Use?

How Do You Know Which Eye Tracking Metrics To Use? As we’ve mentioned before, eye tracking comes at a price – often a high price. Cost prohibitive eye tracking solutions for usability have made for a lot of legitimate questions asking if eye tracking is truly worth it. But let’s assume you’ve bought into the idea that eye tracking is useful, and by some means, be it private or public funding, equipment donation, or cheaper alternatives like DIY eye tracking, you have an eye tracker to work with.

A recent post touches on the immense amount of data eye tracking produces. It’s a lot of data to analyze. For example, Tobii’s Tobii Studio delivers data for: time to first fixation, fixation length, first fixation duration, fixation count, observations length, observation count, fixations before, percentage fixated, percentage clicked, visit duration, visit count, time from first fixation to next mouse click, time to first mouse click, and mouse click count, to name a few. It’s a lot, isn’t it?

Each set of data is provided for each area of interest – specific images, blocks of text, etc. – identified on each page of a website, and so it makes for an incredibly overwhelming amount of data to sift through in order to gain insight into your user experience.

So what metrics should you use? How do you know which metrics to prioritize and which not to pay as much attention to? The post on Inspireux.com recommends a few things that could help you on your way.

It’s important to know what you’re going for before you actually begin your study. Questions like: what, in context of a specific task, constitutes success for each page in your interface? Are you measuring for clicks or calls to action? Or is it interactivity with a certain page? It’s important to identify success metrics beforehand, so you know what you want to measure, giving you a sense of what metrics will be needed in your results.

Another suggestion is to identify which metrics apply for each area of interest. Some metrics may apply to certain areas of interest but not to others. One example the site gives is that you may define success for a page as clicks on a call to action and visibility of brand elements (taglines, etc.). If so, you may focus more on a number of clicks and time to click for calls to action, and then even more on total observation time for non-clickable branding elements.

Don’t forget to focus on the basics. If you try to force insights out of every eye tracking metric, it’s a potential waste of time and effort. If someone looks at an image 5 times it doesn’t mean that you should change it to try and make them look at the image 10 times. In essence, it’s wise to choose your battles.

Eyetracking Metrics for Usability Studies

How Do You Know Which Eye Tracking Metrics To Use?

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