You may have heard some of the same things I have about eyetracking: It’s invaluable. It’s cost-prohibitive. It’s meaningless.
To answer a colleague’s question this afternoon, I found myself clicking around in search of authoritative answers and came across a few pieces worth sharing.
A Word from the Experts
An August 2009 publication by Nielsen/Norman group entitled “Eyetracking Methodology: How to Conduct and Evaluate Usability Studies Using Eyetracking” notes the following:
Should you use eyetracking in your usability studies?
Probably not. The average company does so little usability that it is better served by sticking to simpler (and much cheaper) usability methods, such as thinking aloud and paper prototyping.
Only after you’ve conducted about a hundred rounds of regular usability testing do you reach the stage of insight where you need to dig even deeper and pay closer attention to those details that are only revealed through eyetracking.
All the big things—like people getting lost on your site, not understanding the content, or not even understanding your value proposition in the first place—can be found without eyetracking, and that’s where you should focus first, if you’re only going to run a couple of rounds of user research.
Well, after watching hundreds of eyetracking tests, I can tell you it’s still really hard to know what you can learn from them.
Spool observed several behaviors that caused him to question the significance of the findings. ”Participants would orally tell us they couldn’t see something their gaze was focused on,” he writes. ”Women in my life have referred to this as ‘Male Refrigerator Blindness’ — the inability to see something right in front of you.”
He also noted that participants often would click on objects they had barely gazed at. In fact, Spool says “they’d focus their vision on some part of the screen, then move their mouse to some place else to actually click.”
My Conclusion
I’m fairly certain I’ve never worked on an experience that was polished to the extent that eyetracking would be worth its cost. And I believe that, depending on your goals, there may be a more cost-effective way to collect the data you’re after. Observe unguided users as they interact with your site with ClickTale or UserFly. Find out what users see as most prominent using 5 second tests.
What are your opinions about the usefulness of eyetracking data? Have you ever done an eyetracking study? Share your comments.
See also
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Continuing the Discussion