http://thinkeyetracking.com/Blog/?p=360

I hope it clearly communicates the benefits of eye tracking and web usability testing.

Still, there is no toll that by itself is indispensable, there’s always another way to do it great. Always. Like there’s great wood furniture (and even architecture) made without one single hammer or nail for that matter.

It also does not hit the 80/20 rule. You can find out if you forgot a “next” button or something is below the fold with standard usability. However, what eye tracking gives you is unique and valuable IF done on the right projects and set up the correct way. We had a client that had low click rates on tabs at the top of a page and heavy clicks on the left hand nav. The initial thought was these tabs were not seen since they were below a banner and thus the client was going to delete them and redesign. What we saw immediately in the eye tracking was that user did see the tabs and then moved to the left nav losing valuable time. The issue was with the naming of the tabs not being clear, not the design. Given that eye tracking separated the “why” from the “what” in a way not possible with other methodologies.

And, eye tracking creates cool looking output and some quant methods that teams from C-level to designers can get around. On many projects that is more important than anything else.

My two cents as I am putting off reviewing a report late!

And I will leave you with a quote as to why they wrote this book, taken from their Eye Tracking Methodology paper (which incidently there is a supplementary 8 page document explaining how technology has advanced in the 4 years between writing it, and releasing it…)

“Third, we have to admit that one reason we embraced eyetracking was in order to write several reports as well as our newest book. Eyetracking provides a new way to illustrate Web usability that’s very suited for publishing a full-color book that’s going to look good in bookstores.”

As a supporter and champion of eye tracking I cringe at this statement… if they don’t understand it, practice it becuase they believe in it or are not interested in eye tracking – please stay away from it. Or let someone talk to you about it and inform you how to utilise it effectively.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analogy#Identity_of_relation

Cennyd – excellent article – I think though you were mightly restrained in your critique of the book and their methods.

I read the book over the holiday and it made me cringe as someone who does use eyetracking as a tool to assist with some aspects of UCD – but hey its just a tool and if you use it badly then you produce the hakneyed analyses (the scatter plot of density v num fixations of 35 ‘random’ pages leading to some 8% conclusion based on a correlation analysis – oh pleassse – and check out the line graph for the baseball thing – smirk) and weak visualisations and interpretations that populate this book.

You don’t need eyetracking to produce great design or interaction design – but actually you don’t NEED usability testing either (or any of the other methods us UCD professionals use – but you tend to produce much better designs if you do use them). Eyetracking can help if you use it correctly and can help a lot for certain aspects of design – if you have access to one then you should probably use it (it helps) – if you don’t no worries actually doing the testing is the most important thing – we all know and appreciate that (although see Rolf Molichs common usability evaluation (CUE) reports for some interesting perspectives on that).

In the past I have read a number of rubbish books and atended poor seminars about many topics – it doesn’t make the topic necessarily bad – just reflects on the author or speaker…

hammer : stone :: eye-tracking : all previous design methods, processes, and tools?

A hammer is not a paradigm shift from a stone, it’s a technology advancement that allows an already skilled carpenter to do even better work. Eye tracking is not a paradigm shift, it’s a technology advancement that allows an already skilled moderator to do even better work by moving away from a concurrent talk aloud protocol towards informed use of a retrospective protocol.