EYE TRACKING THE USER EXPERIENCE
A PRACTICAL GUIDE TO RESEARCH
Aga Bojko
Eye Tracking the User Experience
A Practical Guide to Research
By Aga Bojko
Rosenfeld Media, LLC
457 Third Street, #4R
Brooklyn, New York
11215 USA
On the Web: www.rosenfeldmedia.com
Please send errors to: [email protected]
Publisher: Louis Rosenfeld
Managing Editor: Marta Justak
Development Editor: Edward Wade
Copy Editor: Marta Justak
Interior Layout: Danielle Foster
Cover Design: The Heads of State
Cover Illustrator: Martha Rich
Indexer: Sharon Shock
Proofreader: Sue Boshers
© 2013 Aga Bojko
All Rights Reserved
ISBN: 1-933820-10-1
ISBN-13: 978-1-933820-10-1
LCCN: 2013934832
Printed and bound in the United States of America
HOW TO USE THIS BOOK
Who Should Read This Book?
This book is a practical guide that will benefit anyone wanting to learn how to conduct eye tracking studies in order to evaluate and improve the user experience of products and interfaces.
This book is for you if:
• You are considering adding eye tracking to your research but are unsure if it is going to be of value to you.
• You recently purchased an eye tracker and are thinking, “Now what?”
• You’ve been conducting eye tracking studies for a while but would like to expand your repertoire of capabilities.
This is not a UX research handbook; its contents assume a certain level of knowledge and experience with UX evaluation methods on the part of the reader. Therefore, if you are just starting out in the field, you should first learn the basics of formative and summative testing, and then come back to this book.
What’s in This Book?
This book contains everything you need to know to successfully conduct an eye tracking study and obtain useful information from it. The material is divided into four parts:
Part I: Why Eye Tracking?
Before jumping into the how, it’s necessary to establish what eye tracking is, how it works, and most importantly, why even bother doing it. The two chapters in Part I set the stage for the remainder of the book and explain the types of actionable UX insight that can result from eye tracking.
Part II: Study Preparation
Because this book subscribes to the “think first, track later” philosophy instead of the risky and unfortunately common “track first, think later,” Part II is the longest of the four. These six chapters cover everything from preparing the stimuli and tasks for an eye tracking study to figuring out how many participants to recruit and which measures to collect.
Part III: Data Collection
These are nuts and bolts of eye tracking in the narrow sense of the term. Part III explains what to do during study sessions to end up with highquality eye tracking data.
Part IV: Analysis and Reporting
Part IV describes what should happen with the data once they are all in your hands: how to prepare them for analysis and how to distill useful information from them. Both qualitative and quantitative analyses are accounted for in the four chapters that comprise this last section of the book.
Not all of the content in this book is specific to eye tracking. Some applies to non-eye tracking studies as well. The coverage of the more general topics corresponds to the questions that often come up in the context of eye tracking, as well as common mistakes. A good example of this type of material is the in-depth discussion on sample size in Chapter 8. While the method of determining sample size for eye tracking studies is the same as for non-eye tracking studies, the topic had to be included because of the frequent inquiries and widespread misconceptions surrounding the number of participants needed for eye tracking. The far less controversial topic of recruiting procedures, on the other hand, was not given much coverage outside of mentioning a few eye tracking-specific issues.
What Comes with This Book?
This book’s companion website (
FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS
Do I need eye tracking in my research?
It’s like asking “Do I need a microscope?” You don’t need one to see the dust bunnies under your bed, but you do if you want to find a dust mite. It all depends on what you are looking for. So maybe you do need eye tracking, maybe you don’t. Let Chapter 2 be the judge.
Eye tracking is not useful. I’ve seen heatmaps, and they didn’t tell me much.
First, this is not a question. Second, eye tracking is so much more than heatmaps. (As described in Chapter 11, those should only be used in a supplemental role.) Third, whoever gave you heatmaps in place of actual data analysis needs to read this book. Cover to cover. I will gladly hold on to their eye tracker until they are done.
How many participants should I get for an eye tracking study?
42.
Just kidding.