Eye Tracking: Visualizing Usability

June 13, 2006

PHILADELPHIA, PA – 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.

About Electronic Ink

From its headquarters in Philadelphia – and at offices in New York, London and Raleigh – Electronic Ink improves the design and usability of software applications, enterprise software and browser-based applications. The company’s staff of nearly 80 experts is dedicated to conducting groundbreaking work in data visualization, user interface design, usability and human factors, and business process analytics for an elite client roster. For more than 18 years, the company’s solutions have earned superior results for the world’s most notable brands in energy, financial services, health care, media and government. Across all categories, clients continue to select Electronic Ink for its proven ability to impact efficiency and maximize productivity.