In this article, we’ll examine the ins and outs of eye-tracking research, explore how it is used in other industries and settings, and help you make sense of the science.

If your company has a usability lab and you’re unsure what eye tracking can do for you, this article will help.

Eye Tracking Research: The Basics

Human eyes are attracted to different things on a screen, depending on the content and context. For example, people typically fixate on a product image for much longer when shopping than when they’re reading an informative text about any Apple product. This is called selective looking or focused attention.

The opposite of selective looking is visual exploration. When people don’t know what to expect and want to find out more about the visual layout of the page, they will scan multiple areas very quickly. Their attention is captured by unexpected things on the screen (for example, an enlarged image or a link with an interesting title).

But why exactly should you measure this? Wouldn’t it be sufficient to ask users what they were looking at?

Well, eye tracking allows you to identify exactly when and where users direct their attention onscreen. It also reveals how long they remain focused on different elements.

Eye-tracking can reveal information about visual and cognitive processing and how the user deals with task goals. This information can be used to infer how much a user “understands” a certain feature or element or whether they are actively engaged with it.

For example, when you consider the eye movements of people watching an online video, you can determine their interest level in the content. In addition, eye tracking can reveal if users are frustrated by a design element (for example, by following up links without clicking them), indicating that users actively avoid it.

Eye Tracking Research Applied to Web Design and Development

Heatmaps (or gaze plots) are a popular method for identifying what stands out on a website or app during usability testing. Heatmaps show where users spend the most time looking and where their attention is focused. They also allow you to identify areas that users completely ignore or overlook. With heatmaps, you can improve user-friendliness, highlight your most important content, or call attention to difficult-to-find features.

Click maps determine which object on the screen receives the most clicks within a certain period of time. They can find out when users click on links that lead nowhere (for example, they target the wrong link or don’t read any of the text accompanying the link).

To get an idea of how heatmaps, click maps, and other eye-tracking tools can be used to improve your website or app, take a look at this blog.

Eye Tracking Research in Other Industries and Settings

Eye-tracking is not only used in usability testing. It’s also frequently applied to performance improvement and offers feedback sessions. Here are a few examples where eye tracking is used in other industries and settings:

№1: Psychology

Eye-tracking was developed in the 1970s by Dr. Louis Zuckerman. In an era before computers and touch screens, he used it to measure people’s visual attention watching movies or TV shows. When something new appeared onscreen, the viewers would shift their gaze towards it briefly.

№2: Marketing

When designing a social media ad, your goal is to grab people’s attention (on a crowded page) and make them click through to your website. As you can imagine, it’s tough to stand out from the crowd with a single image; however, eye tracking can reveal where people spend most of their time looking at your ad and which elements they want to find out more about.

№3: Internal Customer Service

Customer service teams use eye-tracking to improve performance and uncover potential errors made by employees. The technology allows them to identify where customers are having trouble and when they may give up on a task. This helps teams to improve communication, design more user-friendly systems while also exploring the emotional side of support calls.

№4: Management Consulting

In business cases and problem statement workshops, eye tracking is used to determine how well employees grasp information presented in a real-world scenario (for example, in the case of an American bank — architectural firms wanting to advertise there). It reveals which images are most memorable for users or which features they pay the closest attention to during interviews.

№5: Sales

Sales teams use eye tracking to identify potential customers and picture how the product will be used and which features are most important for different users.

№6: Product UI/UX Designers

Industry professionals involved in product design, development, and testing use eye tracking to gauge user behavior and determine the best path towards creating a well-designed (good-looking) product. They know, however, that there is no one-size-fits-all approach; every user has different needs and is looking at your product from a different angle. This means you have to play around with different design layouts to achieve the best results.

How Eye Tracker Research Will Lead to Better Product Design

Eye-tracking is a valuable method for analyzing user behavior and uncovering potential problems with your website or app design. The technique allows for an in-depth understanding of how users interact with design elements, including colors, fonts, and layout. It can also help you identify what users find most appealing on your website — or what they’re missing entirely.

Studies have shown that people use the top left corner of the page as a starting point when scanning a website (SEMRush). The reason? There are usually navigation and search options in this area of the screen. With a little practice, you can get a more in-depth understanding of how users consume information on your site.

The technique of detecting where someone is looking is known as eye-tracking. Because certain eye-trackers are connected to a pair of spectacles, they can also detect how someone moves their eye while scanning something like a Web page. As a result, each person must wear them, while others may be integrated into computer displays. There’s; actually, there’s one piece of eye-tracking user research you’ll probably be familiar with, and that’s the work carried out by Jacob Nilsson and his colleagues.

They found people tend to scan content, heavy Web pages in an F shape, and this research tells us that designers should put the most important information first. Avoid placing items on the right side of the page, and begin paragraphs and bullet points with keywords since these are the things that people will notice while they’re strolling along the left margin.

Although that’s an important finding, I’ve got to be honest; I’m a bit cynical about using eye-tracking as a usability testing method. Eye-tracking has a lot of wow factors with its heat maps and its gaze plot. It can feel like you’re looking through the user's eyes and poking around inside their brain. But there are some serious problems with eye tracking for routine usability testing. It provides a level of detail that’s rarely if ever needed in user research.

If you’re interested in vision research, that’s different. If you’re a researcher who wants to publish papers in journals like Vision Science, then it’s well and good, but if you’re a researcher who wants to find problems with a user interface, I’m less convinced that eye tracking is the way to do it.

Why is it not Worth for Usability Testing?

Reason №1

First and foremost, eye tracking informs us where someone is looking; this is their foveal vision. The bit of the visual field has the best acuity. But foveal vision isn’t always where someone has our attention focused. We often focus on the peripheral visual field. Now, while gazing at the screen, shift your focus to the environment beyond the screen. Perhaps there is someone in the room with you, and you can focus your attention on them even while reading this article. Isn’t it simple to do? However, an eye tracker would not be able to detect this since your eyes are not focused in that direction.

Reason №2

Second, you can’t just sit someone down in front of an eye tracker and start researching. You have to calibrate the device to each participant, and it’s not unusual for the calibration to foul. Eye-trackers often struggle with people who wear glasses and even people who wear mascara around their eyes. So if you do eye-tracking research, you’ll spend a lot of time faffing around with the technology rather than spending time watching users. But an essential thing to remember about eye tracking is that it is rarely the ideal method to answer a user research question. There is almost always a simpler, less expensive, and faster option available.

Final Thoughts

I would use eye-tracking only if I had to answer a really detailed, fine-grained usability question, like should I write a line or leave a line of my labels on a form to reduce eye movement time. In reality, I never asked this question because the problem with forms isn’t the time I’m taken to make eye movements. It’s the time taken to understand what the labels are asking. That’s by far the bigger issue. Eye-tracking can’t answer that or virtually any other important question to your design team, but traditional usability testing can.

Well, that’s my take, and thanks for reading.