Electronic Ink Media Room: Press Releases
Eye Tracking: Visualizing Usability
June 13, 2006
Philadelphia - Electronic Ink is excited to announce the rollout of Eye Tracking technology in our Usability Lab.
What is Eye Tracking?
Simply put, Eye Tracking is technology that allows us to precisely measure and display where a person is looking when viewing a screen. It is unobtrusive - the user simply watches the screen as he or she normally would without any special apparatus or behavioral restrictions. We measure fixation points (where the user looks), the duration of fixations (how long the user looks), and the path of fixations over time (where the user looks before and after). This lets us see what people are actually looking at when completing a task in a software application or a web site. Eye Tracking is also fast - data capture and results playback are immediate. Our Eye Tracking lab is portable so we can come to your users or go anywhere.
What are the benefits of Eye tracking?
Eye Tracking adds detailed, quantitative data to the usability testing process. We are no longer limited to just general measures (e.g. success rate, errors) or subjective feedback (e.g. comments and ratings). Rather, we can pair traditional usability findings with Eye Tracking data to gain a fuller understanding of the effectiveness of an interface's design and content. For example, if users are having difficulty locating a control within a screen, Eye Tracking can help us determine why this is happening. Are they simply not looking at the control? Are they looking directly at it but misinterpreting its function? Eye Tracking can help us answer these questions and subsequently measure the effectiveness of design changes.
What are the results of Eye Tracking?
The output of Eye Tracking studies are compelling visual displays of quantitative data. These can include video playback of a user's visual path overlaid on the interface or detailed diagrams illustrating areas of focus and visual attention. We can even produce heat maps that display frequently viewed areas of a screen as "hot spots" to illustrate trends across multiple users.
Contact Information
Human Factors Team
Electronic Ink
215.922.3800
