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Which Eye Tracking Metrics Are Best In Usability Testing?

Which Eye Tracking Metrics Are Best In Usability Testing? In a recent post we covered an article written on Inspireux.com about how to narrow down your eye tracking data. There’s a ton of data that comes with any study, and knowing what you want well ahead of the game is really key when it comes to gaining any insight into your own usability study. Too much data can make for a very overwhelming set of results, making it difficult to arrive at a useful conclusion.

The post on Inspireux recommends singling out certain metrics to focus on. Knowing what you want before your study and what constitutes “success” is significant. Once you have determined those points, you can begin a proper study without having to sift through piles of data afterwards. Some specific metrics that seem most relevant in context of usability studies are:

Percentage Fixated: sometimes this is known as Participant Percentage in some versions of Tobii Studio, for example. This piece of data shows the percentage of participants who fixated at least once on a particular area of interest. If you’re trying to determine how many people noticed a button or a call to action on a task, this metric can show you. If used in conjunction with observation length and mouse click count, you can see, within a participant group, who saw an element on a page and how long they looked at it. How long did they need to look before it registered in their memory? Who saw the element? How many clicked on it in context of that specific task?

Another useful metric is Observation Length. Observation length represents how long a participant looked at a specific area of interest. Generally, observation length can give you a good indication of the division of attention various elements of a page receive. For example, you might notice a block of text on a page receives less than a second of total observation. If users are not reading the messaging in full, this metric can tell you. If an element of a page wasn’t seen by a good amount of the participants, but when it was seen, it received a lot of attention – this metric can show you that as well.

The post recommends that, as with all metrics, qualitative questioning can help determine the reasons why some elements were looked at for longer than others.
In the next post we’ll continue with the list of recommended metrics to choose from to help in your own usability studies.

Eyetracking Metrics for Usability Studies

Which Eye Tracking Metrics Are Best In Usability Testing?

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