Paul Nuschke wrote: > Eyetracking lets you see where people are looking in real time.
Yes. But just because you know where someone looks or doesn't look doesn't mean you know anything about what they see, what they wanted to see, and what they didn't see. It's not clear to me how one interprets the "they gazed at this point on the screen for 400 ms" information. Was that good? Was that bad? We know that people see things through their peripheral vision, such as the scroll bar, so that's not recorded by the eye tracker. That means we can't even assume that when someone doesn't gaze at a spot that it wasn't seen. With eye trackers, we have a bunch of observations but no way to determine the proper inferences. Instead, all of the value of an eye tracker comes from the interpretation. Show me a study that shows that N separate evaluators looked at the same eye tracking data and came away with the same conclusions and I'll change my mind. Until then, I'll continue to group it with tarot cards and palm reading as a fine art. > Without considering post-test analysis, this has real value in helping the facilitator better understand what is happening without interfering. Exactly my point. As the President of Best Buy, John "JT" Thompson, once told me (while I was delivering a great presentation with a ton of data): "I worked for Jack Welch at GE for 17 years and if I learned anything while I was there, it was this: If you torture data long and hard enough, it will confess to anything you want." >One analogy I find useful, in terms of understanding what the participant is doing/thinking, is that having eyetracking versus not having eyetracking is like testing in person versus testing remotely. You lost me there. > I wonder, given your research background, Jared, if we are talking about different types of eyetracking studies. For academic/generalizable research, I have found eyetracking studies to be pretty meaningless. Actually, that's pretty funny. I think the most exciting eye tracking stuff is happening in research. There were a ton of good posters and some neat presentations at CHI showing how eye tracking, as an alternative input device, could have some really cool applications, especially for accessibility. I also think there are some interesting cognitive and behavioral psych things to learn by using the devices. But I don't think there's been anything useful in terms of using it as a tool to enhance or inform the design process, so I'm guessing we agree there. > But for testing real products, and only trying to interpret results for those pages, it can be useful and not all that difficult, depending on the stimulus and tasks of course. Yah, not seeing that. What I see is that it falls nicely in the "If you can't dazzle 'em with your brilliance, feel free to baffle 'em with your bullshit" category of helping folks understand how to change their designs. But then again, what do I know? Jared Jared M. Spool User Interface Engineering 510 Turnpike St., Suite 102, North Andover, MA 01845 e: [EMAIL PROTECTED] p: 1 978 327 5561 http://uie.com Blog: http://uie.com/brainsparks . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Posted from the new ixda.org http://www.ixda.org/discuss?post=28208 ________________________________________________________________ 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
