Article Idea:
Eyetracking - Is it worth it?
suggested by Jim Ross on 2009/08/04
Does eyetracking really provide more than just pretty pictures? Can you learn anything from eyetracking that a good designer or usability professional wouldn’t learn anyway through experience and careful observation of people performing tasks?
It’s easy to get excited about eyetracking. Seeing where people look while using your website, software, or product sounds like an amazing addition to traditional usability testing. But it is also expensive and requires extra effort and specialized knowledge. The heat maps and other visualizations certainly look impressive, but what can you really learn from them? After using eyetracking for the first time, many find that it is not easy to know how to analyze and make conclusions from the results. Does eyetracking really provide any additional insights that you would not have discovered anyway through traditional usability testing? Does the value of eyetracking outweigh the limitations? This article will discuss and answer these questions.
Want to see this idea turned into a story?
3 people said yes. | 0 people said no.
Sonja Quirmbach
-1 Reputation points
Posted 2009/08/10 @ 08:49AM with
Eye tracking provides useful addional information beside analytics and figures! It solves many questions about why user don’t click special areas on websites. There are different questions to solve and after them to do’s based of the eye tracking sessions. F. e it is a different between not clicking because user don’ t look at it, or not clicking because it looks very boring to user but of course they look at it. Eye tracking deliver also an inverse heatmap shows the gap between the area user looked and not looked at it. The heatmaps should also checked with the analytics. Could never stand alone and always see with other tests and analytics. But need a very good preparation and concept.
Patrick Stapleton
35 Reputation points
Posted 2009/09/30 @ 13:41PM with
This whole eye tracking thing is a big of a black box to me. Just to have an insight on how best to leverage it and approaches to understanding the results would be great.
Sonja Quirmbach
-1 Reputation points
Posted 2009/12/22 @ 05:41AM with
Good stuff from Jakob Nielsen about eye tracking: http://www.useit.com/eyetracking/