Is Eye Tracking Eye Candy?
Which side are you on? The side that says eye tracking is entirely useful, a tool from which you can gain real insight when it comes to usability studies? Or something more vague, a tool that’s not really a tool at all but a bunch of arbitrary data from which you can’t make any accurate conclusions. Is eye tracking eye candy?
When it comes to usability studies, it’s not all positive in the world of eye tracking. For example, eye tracking provides less opportunity for user feedback. In order for a study participant to create an accurate heatmap, he or she can’t be asked too many questions during the test. Participants often look at the facilitator and away from the screen to answer the question. While you may gain some data with a heatmap, you lose it in the interview process.
Eye tracking can also be somewhat incompatible with people. Let’s face it – some people’s eyes don’t work particularly well with eye tracking. If you have poor vision, or are perhaps elderly, eye tracking can be more trouble than it’s worth.
As we’ve stated before when comparing eye tracking with verbal reports, we know that eye tracking can tell you where and when but it can’t tell you why. With the why question unanswered, it often proves difficult to gain real insight from the large amount of data eye tracking devices generally yield.
Of course, eye tracking is expensive. It’s also technical and requires some level of expertise and knowledge to carry out a study. There are many do-it-yourselfers working in the industry these days and we’ve seen post after post of innovative eye tracking solutions on the cheap, but the fact of the matter is it can be incredibly expensive if you have no backing. Cost is definitely off-putting, as well as frequent technical and logistical issues.
Heatmaps can easily be called “eye candy,” but one advantage to a heatmap is that it can bring people together around an idea or project. Showing the sum of what all usability study participants looked at is easy to digest and a simple solution for a time-strapped executive wanting visual results. Results presented as such are interesting to say the least, and accompanying a report or visual presentation can help people to understand user behavior. But this knowledge must be combined with other knowledge in order to gain any real insight in what the user was actually thinking at the time of the action.
Eye tracking: Eye candy vs. I can do
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