Key Benefits of Eye Tracking
Eye tracking can be a useful tool in measuring and understanding user experience for a website. A post from earlier this year at Cxpartners.co.uk, broke down some key elements and uses for eye tracking.
First off, you see what the user sees. It sounds simple, but the ability to see what the user sees can bring another dimension in understanding how a design is performing. Are the elements you were hoping would be seen, being seen? And are they being understood? When are these elements first seen and how far along from when a user first lands on a site do they see them?
The article goes on to say that making design decisions can be easier with eye tracking. While you may not want to throw all your eggs into one basket, there’s no doubt that eye tracking can help you make informed decisions when it comes to design based off user experience.
Design, like most things, is inherently subjective. Often, this subjectivity can cloud the performance of the design. When you need to evaluate a different approach, eye tracking can allow the designs to be understood from perhaps a more objective view. If you have a difference in design, eye tracking can show the effect of visual hierarchy. It can show whether the visual design impacts the task or goal a user or study participant may have.
Before your study, it’s important to define the user experience fundamentals. There’s a lot of data to sort through and many arbitrary decisions have been made based off trends in design. The page fold is not necessarily a barrier to engaging with the content, and eye tracking can help demonstrate some clear misconceptions in design. For example, why must links be blue? Can users still make sense of a green type? A red one?
As for the copy, eye tracking can help point out which blocks of text are engaging and which are not. Typically a user reads the first line or a couple sentences and then decides if they want to read more. And again, typically they do not. People skim, and eye tracking can show it.
The article brings up an interesting point that I haven’t seen much about in other posts, and that’s that eye tracking is a great way to engage the project team. It can be a peer/camaraderie building exercise as well as a study in itself. The red dot fixated on can be quite engaging, and eye tracking, by default, is a great way to bring others in to the conversation.
Adding an extra dimension to UX with eyetracking
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