Cards on the table. I love eye tracking. It%u2019s the sharpest tool in the box for user experience research. It%u2019s the best way to observe natural behaviour. Think-aloud in usability testing is unnatural and can create false data.
More cards on the table. I%u2019m appalled at some of the work carried out by some of the eye tracking companies. If you ever observe a user being encouraged to think aloud during an eye tracking session, just walk out and find a better research company. In simple terms, there are two ways in which you can use eye tracking equipment - Quantitatively and Qualitatively. Modern eye tracking equipment is simple to use. Modern eye tracking equipment takes 30 seconds to set-up. Modern eye tracking equipment is non-invasive. Modern eye tracking equipment is very accurate. Don%u2019t listen to the flat-Earthers, the earth is round and eye tracking is not a Ouija Board. In quantitative analysis you can show people stimulus and measure how they visually engage with it. Ultimately allowing you to benchmark the effectiveness of designs against the original brief. The user should not talk during the sessions as users will look at what they are talking about and produce false data (such as f-patterns?). There are varying degrees of inference with this type of research - but you keep this in mind when using the evidence to make decisions. Who doesn%u2019t want to see where people look when reviewing design options? In qualitative analysis, you sit people in front of an eye tracking monitor and get people to engage with stimulus in a natural way. As an example, if it%u2019s a website you%u2019re researching, you%u2019d start the participant off at google and ask them to go buy that thing they%u2019d just been talking about. Once the user has completed their tasks, the practitioner would play back the eye tracking to the user. This is where the really cool stuff happens. Giving a participant the visual cue of where they looked, allows them to recall conscious and subconscious strategies. If they looked at something and didn%u2019t see it, they will tell you they didn%u2019t see it. In fact, they will tell you why they didn%u2019t see it. The ketchup in the fridge analogy is very important and demonstrates why it%u2019s important to use a retrospective methodology in testing. Inference has no place in qualitative analysis in eye tracking studies. Here%u2019s the real deal. Asking users to think-out-aloud adds a huge cognitive load to the user. So much extra cognitive load, that users are more likely to fail a task because of the thinking out aloud. Over 60% of your behaviour is automatic and we don%u2019t know why/how we do things. We just do stuff. So, when a user is thinking-out-aloud in research - just what are usability practitioners listening to? A projected persona? Google sums this up in a nice quote from 2008: %u201Cpeople are masters of saying one thing and doing another%u201D Eye tracking allows us to see what they do and retrospective review gives us deep insight into why. Nobody should be making inferences from heatmaps. Please move away from the basic red dot bouncing on a screen argument, and think about what you could do with a tool that allowed you to really understand user strategies, indepth. Guy Redwood founder of SimpleUsability http://www.simpleusability.com . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Posted from the new ixda.org http://www.ixda.org/discuss?post=44684 ________________________________________________________________ Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list ....... disc...@ixda.org Unsubscribe ................ http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe List Guidelines ............ http://www.ixda.org/guidelines List Help .................. http://www.ixda.org/help
