When used together with other user experience research, Eye tracking offers tremendous value for improving products.
Eye tracking measures unconscious behavior - and provides data that people simply cannot verbalize in other common user research methods, especially think aloud usability testing protocols. Decades of psychology research show that much human behavior occurs at an unconscious level. The human eye, for example, can make up to 5 fixations per second and this occurs below people's level of conscious awareness. So in a 30 second scan of a typical homepage, the customer may be looking at up to 150 items on the page. Your customers (or research participants) simply cannot verbally tell you where their eyes are going and this is exactly the value that good eye tracking data provides. Knowing what people are looking at - and in what order - is essential information for improving interaction and visual design on websites. Creating a design that guides eye flow in a way that meets both business and user needs is an essential part of an "easy-to-use" design. Our experience is that visual attention data IS correlated with behavioral performance metrics. If people don't "see" something, then they are less likely to click it. Rather than waiting many weeks or months to see live site click-thru behavior, you can incorporate eye tracking earlier in your product cycle to make the design process more efficient. For example, if you are working on several iterations of your homepage in a redesign effort (common scenario for most internet companies!), knowing which design better captures visual attention and how it is distributed across the page elements - is a critical input to iterative design work. And as we all know, sometimes its much harder (or impossible) to change things later, so there's a huge advantage to obtaining this data as early as possible in the product design cycle and not waiting until later... disclaimer - yes, we provide eye tracking! http://www.customerexperiencelabs.com/services/eye-tracking-lab/ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 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
