Benjamin, As you may know, eye tracking has traditionally been used to study topics such as banner blindness (or awareness) on websites and visual search (Are people seeing the critical warning signal on the interface? How do users search through the icons on their desktop?). You can find some examples on Anthony Hornof's site here:
http://www.cs.uoregon.edu/~hornof/publications.html or this paper from a former labmate here: http://chil.rice.edu/research/pdf/FleetwoodIcons.pdf I'm guessing this is what you meant by: "shouldn't eye-tracking provide some sort of validation in the physical sense?" For instance, you might want to find out how frequently people look at the ads on Facebook (since it previously did not run ads). You could of course ask them informally if they noticed them, after running them through some tasks, but eyetracking would give you hard data (e.g., numbers...frequencies). The linked examples are from academia -- given the amount of tedious post analysis eyetracking requires, in the commercial arena, I'd only use it if you really needed hard data to support your design / recommendations. For example, if you're testing safety (e.g., warning light) / business (e.g., banners) critical products. I haven't been following this thread, so I apologize if I've just repeated what others have already stated. :-) Phil Chung ----- Original Message ---- From: Benjamin Ho <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Thursday, December 27, 2007 6:46:47 PM Subject: Re: [IxDA Discuss] Does eye-tracking carry any real meaning? I am actually intrigued by what Eye-tracking technology could offer. I understand that the data is only as good as what kind of meaning we put towards it - but then again, isn't that inherent in nearly everything we do? The users tell us like it is - but then we find out in research that it isn't so. We go by the user's actions instead. So taking that into consideration, shouldn't eye-tracking provide some sort of validation in the physical sense? And what about not really knowing what the problem is? While we may be able to capture mouse-clicks, where the user looks first and in those subsequent times, should we then just take a guess or use eye-tracking? I'm in the process of designing web applications (not websites) and would like to know if anyone's used eye-tracking for that, taking into consideration its flaws and strengths as discussed by Jared and the others. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Posted from the new ixda.org http://www.ixda.org/discuss?post=22895 ________________________________________________________________ *Come to IxDA Interaction08 | Savannah* February 8-10, 2008 in Savannah, GA, USA Register today: http://interaction08.ixda.org/ ________________________________________________________________ Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list ....... [EMAIL PROTECTED] Unsubscribe ................ http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe List Guidelines ............ http://www.ixda.org/guidelines List Help .................. http://www.ixda.org/help ____________________________________________________________________________________ Never miss a thing. Make Yahoo your home page. http://www.yahoo.com/r/hs ________________________________________________________________ *Come to IxDA Interaction08 | Savannah* February 8-10, 2008 in Savannah, GA, USA Register today: http://interaction08.ixda.org/ ________________________________________________________________ Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list ....... [EMAIL PROTECTED] Unsubscribe ................ http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe List Guidelines ............ http://www.ixda.org/guidelines List Help .................. http://www.ixda.org/help
