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Eyetracking: Cool, but how helpful?
Eyetracking is becoming somewhat of a hot topic in the UX blogsphere these days. It’s got just the right feel of objective validity mixed with technical novelty. There’s also some really cool visualization techniques out there to help us make sense of the raw data.
Some have gotten right into the action, turning eyetracking data into readymade insights for interaction designers.
Jared Spool recently weighed in on the subject on his company’s blog, articulating what we think is a more balanced and down-to-earth view of the situation.
New analytical paradigms often have an instant appeal in our industry—I suppose, because things seem more scientific. It’s worth bearing in mind that same problem always crops up when we overlook the gap between experimental disciplines like cognitive psychology (where you’re looking at first order effects) and applied disciplines like interface design (Nth order effects). There’s such a huge leap there!
Take Fitts’ law —it’s super sexy because it’s predictive and mathematically well-formed; but the design implications are limited: put stuff on the periphery of the display (where the hit area is effectively infinite) to make it easier to acquire targets. This is why the locking the toolbar to the top of the screen (Mac OS) is more efficient than locking it to the window (MS Windows). Cool insight, but did we really need an equation to figure this out?
I just want to add to Dave’s post. I was really taken with eyetracking when I first saw the heat maps but I’ve been asking the question “How would this information change our design decisions”. If we had this information would we really design any differently? Also to Jared Spool’s point “what does it really tell you”? I can’t quite reconcile those questions.
I am open to learning more and don’t want to write eyetracking off but something these are nagging questions.
We subconsciously grow accustomed to the conventional wisdoms of certain user interface aspects (ie. “X” means close or even scroll bars and their usage – sure, it’s intuitive – these days). See something enough times and you learn to accept it – plain and simple.
Consequently, there will always be those users who cause ripples in the way we see things. Sometimes ripples bring forth design evolution, but more often than not ripples bring forth angry yells to stop rocking the boat (no animated Sherlock Holmes cursors, thanks for coming out though Microsoft Plus).
There are many design elements in use today that exist for no other reason than the fact that they’re legacy elements passed on from generation to generation, version to version. Microsoft got it right with the ‘Start’ button. Apple still gets it wrong by not having all applications readily available in a direct & simple way.
“Click the finder icon then click applications in the left then find the program you’re looking for by scrolling around awhile” – Sure, for those who’ve used a Mac it’s easy – but many aren’t going to think so, especially when they can visually identify a button labelled ‘Start’ and quickly navigate to what they want just by moving their cursor over appropriately named categories (no clicking or excess scrolling).
The venerable David Barclay made a good point regarding the usefulness of Apple’s Spotlight search: why’m I only finding this out now?
Not exactly his words, but the message is all the same.
It’s such a perfectly executed function yet it’s so imperfectly implemented from an initiation perspective. With most Macs having the screen real estate wide enough to accommodate it, why not build a spotlight search bar right into the top menu bar so all it would take would be the quick identification of an input field accompanied by a magnifying glass (or even a textual “Search”) submit button. There would be no room for confusion. Zero redundancy.
Conversely, give a gem of a tool like that to MS and you’ll be getting “helpful” tooltips and hints promoting it for the rest of your life every time you even think of looking at the screen.
Regardless, I know I’d rather have just a simple text field built into the menubar than having to click it or use a key combo to activate it.
In regards to web user interface design, just because N% are more inclined to read/click things on the left side of a 2-pane website layout still leaves room for X% to read/click things on the right. Sure, content and aesthetics can be optimized or tweaked to accommodate the larger percentage’s viewing habits, but everything in moderation… I definitely wouldn’t stuff all my gold content into the left just because 55% are clicking left-pane content. Otherwise, what becomes of the quality of content in the right-pane?
Heat maps are an interesting tool that really just confirm what many of us already know when it comes to design – we’re trained and constantly training ourselves how to interpret today’s visual interfaces and if somebody’s going to wander off the beaten path of conventional wisdom, they’d better do a damn good job at it or they’ll just be remembered as that jerk who rocked the boat.