Eye Tracking: The Good and The Bad

Another article forwarded to us summed up some points about eye tracking, and we wanted to share. As many of our readers know, eye tracking has been around for decades but has only become commercially available (and viable/affordable) in recent years. At first it was heralded as “the next big thing,” and we now see that, when it comes to usability studies, there’s some debate as to the merits of eye tracking. Of course, eye tracking for communicative and medical industry-related applications, raises separate issues. But for usability, there are some real concerns about its accuracy.

With any new trend comes the inevitable backlash. Some call it an expensive gadget that doesn’t tell a usability analyst more than they already know. Others say it’s entirely useful and can lead to better understanding of user experience. With a few years hindsight, what does ring true is that eye tracking cannot be used by itself. It’s not an exclusive tool and only when it’s used in conjunction with other studies does it prove its worth.

So where do you stand in the eye tracking debate? Is eye tracking something useful or is it a waste of time, money, and effort? Eye tracking seems most useful when you want to test things like brand awareness, navigation, and page layout. If you’re choosing a homepage design, eye tracking can help if you create a set of criteria against which to test and then see which homepage design is most effective.

Eye tracking can also prove what people say – again, eye tracking for supplementary research is the key. If some say they didn’t notice something on a page, eye tracking can prove it. Not that they thought about it and comprehended it, but more objectively if they saw the element or not. Users tend not to notice navigation actions until they’re actually lost. If you want to check whether brand elements were noticed at all, eye tracking can help as well. Did your study participant look at a “buy button,” a promotion, a banner ad, etc? Again – it can’t necessarily tell you what they were thinking when they saw these elements. That’s for more subjective and emotional studies to get at.

But in collaboration with interviews and educated guessing, eye tracking can be quite useful.
Check out the original article here and stay tuned for our next post – we’ll focus a bit more on some of the problems with eye tracking.

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