Eye Tracking Update » fixations

Tobii Announces a Faster, Better Eye Tracker

dbrendant — Fri, 24 Dec 2010 16:30:06 +0000

Tobii Technology gets a lot of play both here and around the web. They’re one of the more established eye tracking businesses in the industry and have worked with many websites for usability purposes. In a recent article at Bradenton.com, Tobii is reported as having launched a 300 Hz eye tracker that should give users [...]

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Eye Tracking: How Does Color Affect Attention?

dbrendant — Thu, 16 Dec 2010 16:30:24 +0000

In a recent paper, eye tracking was used to detail the effects of color on human overt attention. The paper, penned by Torsten Benz of the University of Osnabruck, Germany, investigates the influence of color on attention. In carrying out his study, he used eye tracking data from earlier research developed by Willenbocke, as well [...]

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How Can Eye Tracking Improve Interactions With Mobile Devices

dbrendant — Thu, 11 Nov 2010 17:00:09 +0000

Another paper focusing on eye tracking and eye-based interaction in mobile devices was passed along to us. In it, Jayson Turner writes on mobile devices and their function of collecting information on surroundings and context. Mobile devices are meant to interact with and determine the context in which they function, navigate, and analyze. For example, [...]

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Eye Tracking Shows We Start At The Top

dbrendant — Tue, 26 Oct 2010 17:27:22 +0000

In a recent article posted at a pay-per-click sales site, they rave about eye tracking and how it’s changed design altogether. Of course, it’s not eye tracking that’s changed design, heat maps and corresponding eye tracking studies and results can help inform a designer or content manager how the public sees their site. It can’t [...]

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Eye Tracking Study Users in Interactive Search

dbrendant — Fri, 01 Oct 2010 18:45:48 +0000

Eye tracking is a technology that is being used worldwide as a powerful research tool. In fact, we came across this recent study out of Germany in which Thomas Beckers and Norbert Fuhr of the University of Duiburg-Essen teamed up to research how users handle interactive search systems. Interested in book titles, they created a [...]

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Eye Tracking Emphasizes Significance of Search Snippets

dbrendant — Mon, 20 Sep 2010 16:00:58 +0000

A recent study used eye tracking to demonstrate how important the meta description of a website is for searchers. They call these brief tidbits “search snippets” and as it turns out, they strongly contribute to the attraction of a searcher to a particular site. The original study, though written in Spanish by Mari-Carmen Marcos and [...]

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More Debate on Effectiveness of Eye Tracking

dbrendant — Wed, 18 Aug 2010 16:00:25 +0000

We came across another couple articles focusing on what you’ve always wanted to know about eye tracking. The articles were posted on Another Useful Blog, a German blogger’s site that covers usability issues in interface design. The articles were broken up into two parts, and we’ll cover the first in this post and the 2nd [...]

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How Do You Know Which Eye Tracking Metrics To Use?

dbrendant — Fri, 13 Aug 2010 16:00:42 +0000

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, [...]

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Shocking Revelation: Eye Tracking Has Problems

dbrendant — Tue, 10 Aug 2010 16:17:49 +0000

With more than a few articles under our belt on the strengths of eye tracking, we thought it might be interesting to point out some of the limitations of eye tracking. We’ve mentioned in previous posts that eye tracking can provide insight into the usability of a website, but without supplementary effort, the data gleaned [...]

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Is Eye Tracking for Usability Studies Worth the Trouble?

dbrendant — Mon, 09 Aug 2010 16:00:35 +0000

Despite many advancing eye tracking technologies, there are still naysayers that continually challenge the industry with fair questions. One question: Is eye tracking worth it? It’s easy to get excited about eye tracking and the ability to see where people look while they’re using a website. It sounds like an incredible opportunity to gain insight [...]

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How Do You Measure the Value of Eye Tracking?

dbrendant — Sun, 08 Aug 2010 16:00:03 +0000

We recently wrote an article touching on some of the limitations of eye tracking. There are more. Of course, nothing is perfect, and many naysayers have legitimate concerns when it comes to eye tracking in the realm of usability. Most of these limitations are based around usability studies, which is certainly what most think about [...]

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Framework for Eye Tracking Patterns and Usability Problems: Pt 2

dbrendant — Wed, 14 Jul 2010 16:51:03 +0000

In a recent post, we started to review new research being done at the Centre for HCI Design at City University in London. Two researchers, Ehmke and Wilson, set out to establish a framework by which to observe and analyze any correlations between eye tracking and what a person is thinking as they’re maneuvering around [...]

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Framework for Eye Tracking Patterns and Usability Problems: Part 1

dbrendant — Thu, 08 Jul 2010 23:51:29 +0000

When you are trying a new product, you want it to work, right? If a company makes a good product, people use it. If it’s a bad product, people will not – it’s quite simple. Of course there are several factors like strategy, marketing, money, connections, production, and even a little luck involved in making [...]

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Eye Tracking Research on Banner Ad Blindness

dbrendant — Thu, 10 Jun 2010 00:22:31 +0000

Humans adapt in mysterious ways. Sometimes they adapt in more obvious ones though. When you’re browsing through webpages, you’re continuously bombarded with advertisements, flashing colors, expanding boxes, and catchy text. But in all honesty, if I surf the web for 15 minutes, I won’t recall any particulars about the ads I’ve seen, let alone notice [...]

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Eye Tracking and Social Anxiety

dbrendant — Wed, 02 Jun 2010 00:17:10 +0000

These days it’s impossible to turn on the television without seeing an ad for social anxiety medication. The sad little animated lump rolling along the screen reminds us that it’s one of the most prevalent psychiatric conditions, affecting a large swath of the population. A recent study focusing on the subject explored how socially anxious [...]

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Can Eye Tracking be Used to Predict Strategic Behavior?

mfox — Fri, 07 May 2010 20:06:17 +0000

Life is full of choices, all of which have payoffs and pitfalls. When you have a goal and make choices or decisions on how to achieve it, you are developing a strategy. Creating and executing a strategy is a highly cognitive process; your mind is looking at available options and evaluating the pros and cons [...]

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Eye Tracking: Social Behavior and How We Look at Faces

dbrendant — Fri, 02 Apr 2010 00:31:24 +0000

It’s no secret that eyes are incredibly expressive. Watch someone’s eyes during a conversation. They smile, they grieve, they fear, they laugh. You can see various emotions rising to the top as they interact with their surroundings, you included. As humans, fixation on the eyes is critical in our perception of emotion and the communication [...]

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Using Eye Tracking to Identify Optimal Product Placement

mfox — Sun, 28 Mar 2010 16:00:51 +0000

Isn’t it amazing how many types of shampoo you find in the hair care aisle? There’s a shampoo out there for everyone; if your hair is dry, thin, oily, blonde or frizzy there is guaranteed to be a product specially designed to moisturize, thicken, brighten, clarify or straighten just for you. But realistically, doesn’t shampoo just [...]

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Eye Tracking: Investigating What Women Notice in Advertisements

mfox — Thu, 25 Mar 2010 16:59:01 +0000

There has been a lot of controversy about the use of images of thin models in media and the effect that constant exposure to these images has on the self-perception of the “average” female. Women see these “idealized” images of the female body on TV and in advertisements constantly, and studies have shown that this [...]

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Eye Tracking … Baby-Style

mfox — Fri, 19 Mar 2010 22:20:56 +0000

Wouldn’t it be interesting to see the world from the perspective of an infant as it explores its surroundings? Observing looking behavior in infants can provide valuable information about perception, cognition, and social development because visual information obtained through fixations on environmental elements often guides physical actions. Natural vision behavior is the best way to [...]

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How Does Eye Tracking Detect the Object of Visual Attention?

mfox — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 20:58:06 +0000

A recent Eye Tracking Update post detailed the basic anatomy of the eye and the two primary types of vision, foveal and peripheral. To continue the discussion on eye biology and how it relates to eye tracking technology, let’s take a look at the behavior that brings the two together: eye movement. The majority (about [...]

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Eye Tracking Looks at How We Rely on Google for Answers

mfox — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 19:44:58 +0000

The Internet has changed the way we seek information. Up until the last couple decades, information was found in books or in the minds of those more knowledgeable about a subject than ourselves. But today, if you have a question, you just “Google it.” The seemingly all-knowing Google (or Yahoo, MSN, Bing, etc.) is where [...]

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Eye Tracking: Curtain Call

dbrendant — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 18:33:26 +0000

An interesting article popped up recently on a blog written by Tim Boucher, a self-proclaimed college drop-out-turned-researcher/blogger who deals with subjects including biological systems, consciousness, psychology of the mind, and the human experience in general. As a working production assistant on theatrical plays, Boucher has become interested in the idea of the human perceptual system [...]

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The Latest in Eye Tracking Web Usability Research pt2

mfox — Thu, 18 Feb 2010 23:12:43 +0000

It is no secret that eye tracking is one of the most revealing approaches to evaluating web usability. A viewer’s eye movement behavior as they scan through a webpage or site can tell a lot about how navigable and user friendly the design is. Of course there are other, simpler evaluation tools like monitoring cursor [...]

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Eye Tracking Study Compares Tag Cloud Layouts

mfox — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 00:32:58 +0000

From the massive quantity of information on the Internet arises the challenge of trying to organize it in a way that enables users to find what they need. What good is having all the answers to all the questions if you can’t locate the answer to the question you are actually asking? Media sharing, social [...]

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Where’s Waldo?… Eye Tracking Only Registers Half of the Visual Search Process

mfox — Tue, 02 Feb 2010 01:08:59 +0000

Many people are familiar with the popular “Where’s Waldo” books, in which you search for the red and white sweater-clad Waldo in a chaotic scene of colors and images. But while you were scanning the pictures for the little man, you were most likely unaware of the complex brain functions and visual processing that was [...]

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Eye Tracking: Simple and Rational Is Better In Advertising

dbrendant — Sat, 30 Jan 2010 20:00:51 +0000

Several Eye Tracking Update posts have mentioned saccades and fixations, two terms that essentially make up the nuts and bolts of eye tracking. It was Louis Émile Javal, a French ophthalmologist that first noticed humans’ tendency to dart their eyes around when reading, stopping and starting as they scan across a sentence on a page. [...]

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Eye Tracking: The Next Stage

dbrendant — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 20:00:07 +0000

In a recent post focusing on eye tracking through the ages, we left off with the early 20th century accomplishments of Charles H. Judd and Thomas Buswell. While it’s a relatively short history, the progression of eye tracking has been rich with development, and curious figures like these would pave the way for a wide-open [...]

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Eye Tracking: The First Half

dbrendant — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 00:05:02 +0000

In 1879, a Parisian ophthalmologist named Louis Émile Javal made some groundbreaking observations about eye movement and the way readers scanned across a series of words. After studying the eye movements of readers without the aid of eye tracking technology, he observed that humans’ eyes do not move continuously across a line of text, but [...]

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Barbies Vs. Balls: Eye Tracking Investigates Toy Preferences and Gender

mfox — Tue, 19 Jan 2010 19:28:21 +0000

Any big sister knows the devastation her Barbies risk in the hands of a little brother. My collection had several casualties because my younger brother’s idea of playing “Barbie Dream House” was very different from mine. While mine involved accessorizing, grooming, and planning elaborate Barbie parties, his was full of demolition, chaos, and artillery fire [...]

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Fixations and Saccades in Eye Tracking

dbrendant — Tue, 19 Jan 2010 00:47:59 +0000

A recent blog post on eye tracking brings to light a variable that many researchers who use eye tracking technology have to deal with throughout their studies. When using gaze or eye movement for research, you must distinguish between fixations and saccades. And to understand this difference, we have to look at the physical structure [...]

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