User Experience for a Better World

Eye Insights: What Can Eye Tracking Tell Us That We Didn't Already Know?

Eye tracking is a great tool to help us understand what happens in what I call the breakdown event. The breakdown event is something that goes wrong during a usability test during task completion.

In this example, participants were asked to complete a form to sign up for a new service. During the sign up process, we noticed that several participants were skipping a critical field necessary to completing the sign up successfully.

The scan paths from the eye tracking revealed to us that many of the participants' eyes initially jumped further down on the screen completely missing this key field!

Eye tracking helped to uncover exactly what was causing the breakdown event to occur and helped the designers to come up with a plan to fix the problem.

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Comment by Gino Lardon on May 6, 2009 at 4:10pm: I never use eye-tracking to test basic forms since i believe a surfer walks sequentially through the different form fields. I agree that on advanced forms where functionality and information dynamically (dis)appears, eye-tracking can be helpful.

Comment by Andrew Schall on April 8, 2009 at 10:41am: Unfortunately, I can't share the client or URL for this project due to NDA.

Comment by Bimal Desai on April 8, 2009 at 5:11am: can you share the URL?

Comment by Andrew Schall on April 7, 2009 at 5:30pm: Eye-tracking clearly revealed to us the problem that was occuring (users did not notice the payment schedule fields), however it did not reveal WHY they weren't looking at it. Once we saw this eye-gaze pattern occuring for several participants, we needed to ask them directly why they weren't looking at it. We discovered that users were specifically looking to enter their payment information on this page and did not expect to enter in a payment schedule. The solution was to put the payment information fields above the payment scheduling (where users were looking for it) and more clearly indicate that payment scheduling was a required field.