I’ve always, when asked, considered eyetracking to be pretty futile when it comes to improving the customer experience through good design. I guess my point is that design is generally so poor in producing ‘flow‘ within a web experience that the user is always spending time deliberating what they are doing rather than just doing. When design gets better, then eyetracking might be more use, but now when all user activity is so self-conscious, lets not bother, do a usability lab instead.

But maybe I’m just a wrong-headed miserabilist. Some interesting stuff from the US is providing some real looking and interesting results. They look at media sites, which in many ways have become subject to a standard(ish) layout in the way that newspapers have. So perhaps with this domain we do get flow and people are doing and not deliberating about doing.

Maybe this just reflects the new movement towards more consideration of the user and whats in their head rather than whats on the screen. As this site reflects, that is my view, so perhaps alongside measurement of affect (emotion) we now need to roll in other indirect measurements of cognitive behaviour like eyetracking, facial movements, eegs even…

As an aside, in usability labs you do see eyes move. Its hard to record, and all anecdotal, but I believe I have seen a tendancy or movement towards an initial focus at the centre of the screen rather than top left. In the report the eyetrackers say that you would ‘expect’ an initial focus top left.

But maybe this depends on how you think of the web. If the web is percieved as ‘document’ then you would go top left, as you would a newspaper or book. But if the web is percieved as ‘moving media’ like TV or film, then you’d look in the middle… in which case, yes this IS interesting and perhaps with eyetracking we can really start to get inside peoples heads.

Share This