[Sigia-l] eye tracking?

[Stewart Dean]

>From: "Rupert Smith" <rupert.smith at complinet.com>
>To: <sigia-l at asis.org>

>As part of this expansion, i want to persuade the company to invest in
>some eye-tracking equipment: we have diverse content, a brochureware
>site, and our business model relies quite heavily on cross-promotion of
>products; i think all these areas could benefit from eye tracking
>analysis.

I thought about softening this up but descided not to.

I personaly don't feel eye tracking is of any real value. It shows what 
users are looking at but not really what they are thinking or what they are 
seeing when they look at something.

For a classic example of why eye tracking can be misleading I refer to:

http://www.useit.com/alertbox/video.html

The incorrect conclusion from this is that talking head video is boring and 
the recommendations are awful (keep it short and dynamic).  Instead just 
make the content intersting. It doesnt matter if they're not looking at the 
person talking as the report missed one vital part - the audio.

Eye tracking is one of those techniques that leads to lots of data which is 
increadibly easy to misuse, as in this example. With any usability activity 
you have to make sure that conclusions are user driven, not data driven.

My advise is to save money on eye tracking and instead spend the money saved 
on more indepth interviews (one to one interviewing as user research).  You 
will learn more from one session of talking to someone than 10 eye tracking 
sessions (and you stand less chance of jumping to the wrong conclusion or 
one that is subjective, as with the useit example).

Just to hammer home the point in the useit example the'clear' conclusion 
should have been supported by asking the viewers afterwards what they could 
recall of the message.

Stewart Dean