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participant to move back/forward, left/right, or raise/lower their seat to recap-
ture the participant's eyes.
Information provided by an eye-tracking system can be remarkably useful in
a usability test. Simply enabling observers to see where the participant is looking
in real time is extremely valuable. Even if you do no further analyses of eye-track-
ing data, just this real-time display provides insight that would not be possible
otherwise. For example, assume a participant is performing a task on a website
and there's a link on the homepage that would take him directly to the page
required to complete the task. The participant keeps exploring the website, going
down dead ends, returning to the homepage, but never reaching the required
page. In a situation like this, you would like to know whether the participant
ever saw the appropriate link on the homepage or whether he saw the link but
dismissed it as not what he wanted (e.g., because of its wording). Although you
could subsequently ask participants that question, their memory may not be
completely accurate. With an eye-tracking system you can tell whether the par-
ticipant at least fixated on the link long enough to read it.
7.2.2 Visualizing Eye-Tracking Data
There are many ways to visualize eye-tracking data. These visualizations tell the
story about where people were looking and when. They might be the only thing
that your stakeholders really care about. All eye-tracking visualizations are either
at an individual level, showing eye movements for one participant, or at an
aggregate level, showing eye movements for more than one participant.
WEBCAM-BASED EYE TRACKING
New technology has been developed that allows UX researchers to run eye-tracking
studies remotely by taking advantage of the participant's webcam. Webcam-based eye
tracking operates under the same premise as more traditional systems use. However,
instead of using an infrared signal, a webcam is recognizing the participant's eyes,
specifically the movement of the pupil to determine the location on the stimuli the
participantisfixating.VendorssuchasEyeTrackShop(
www.eyetrackshop
) provide web-
based eye-tracking services, which include setting up the study, storing the data, and
providing the analysis and a report. Participants initially agree to allow their webcam to
be used for the study and then go through a calibration step prior to running the study.
Figure 7.4
is an example screen that the participant would see during the setup process.
Similar to any eye-tracking study, different images or visual stimuli are shown to the
participants, along with the option to add different survey questions. This technology
has the potential to be very useful for UX researchers in that eye movement data can now
be collected from a large number of participants, over a short amount of time, without
respect to geography. For example, advertisers are now able to test ad effectiveness
with a statistically reliable sample size, across many different markets. Data from an
EyeTrackShop study clearly show that the “Devil Ad” is clearly more effective with
respect to drawing visual attention than the other two ads (see
Figure 7.5
).
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