>From Nancy Broden:
One question I do have for the eye-tracking supporters out there: if
the results culled from all the eye-tracking studies where
implemented wouldn't all of our websites look the same or at least
very, very similar?
_____________

I do not consider myself an eye-tracking supporter anymore then I
consider myself a supporter of Allen wrenches (it is just a tool).
Also, as a consultant I have never encountered a situation in which I
felt eye tracking was the correct tool for the job. If I was back in
academia, I could imagine lots of times I would want to use it. 

Those caveats out of the way, lots of standards and best practices
have evolved on where to place navigations and body content. But in
no way do all sites look the same. These studies mean something in
aggregate. You take the results from all of the studies and you use
your training and judgment to apply it. 

If an eye tracking study just reports the results as a list of
commandments with none of the data or methodology behind it... then
we really can not use the results in our day-to-day job.

_________
>From Nancy Broden:
Eye-tracking feels like a desperate attempt to "scientifically"
prove the value of Design (with a big D) . I don't have enough time
to wade into that one...
_______

I can see coming to that conclusion if we are just using it to study
a small set of marketing sites or some e-commerce sites. But I
recently read a great article (sorry can not find the link, but I
hope someone on this list has it) where an eye tracking study was
used to aid in the design of software for radiologists. What they
found was that radiologists had higher dwell times on tumors that
they missed. They where able to determine some of the misses the
radiologists may have caught on their own if they where better able
to go back to past images. Given that the fast bulk of what they look
at are true negatives, their muscle memory kicks in and they mark an
image as negative before they fully processed it.




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Posted from the new ixda.org
http://www.ixda.org/discuss?post=22825


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