Eye tracking is an advanced technique that pinpoints exactly where users look and for how long.

Eye tracking is a technique that evaluates how people look at an interface. It uses sophisticated technology to reflect invisible infrared light onto an eye and pinpoint exactly where people look.

Eye tracking adds detailed, quantitative data to the user testing process and helps to better understand emotions and cognitive processes by tracking eye movement and eye-fixation patterns.

Eye tracking helps you choose between alternative designs, check whether page elements were noticed and understand how people find and read information.

Here’s what it looks like in action.

There are two main outputs of eye tracking.

One is called a gaze plot, which shows the order that people look at things and how long they look, as shown in the image below from Xero.com. The order in which things were looked at is represented by the numbers, and the size of the blobs indicates how long they looked at that spot.

The second output is called a heat map, which indicates how long people look at things. The hotter the area, the more people looked at it, as shown below:

Benefits

Eye tracking is a non-intrusive technique that:

• Showcases the very best way to design, lay out and position key page items, so that your website achieves your business goals
• Moves away from subjective opinion to real data. No more arguments – eye tracking will explicitly shows you whether users notice key content or not
• Provides compelling visualizations of design and usability problems, highlighting how quickly users notice features and for how long they look at them
• Engages (even excites!) your team and stakeholders through live viewing of the eye tracking sessions.

Deliverables

After analysing the test data we’ll come to your offices and present a prioritised list of key findings and recommendations. We will also leave you with a detailed report, which typically includes:

• Eye tracker gaze plots – show the path that users’ eyes took when looking at a page
• Heat maps – highlight the areas the users paid most attention to
• Videos