Eye Tracking Best Practices and Mistakes to Avoid
John Cheng, Brennan Browne, Julie Kwak, AnswerLab

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Full info at: http://www.baychi.org/calendar/20110315/

Eye tracking is a powerful research tool that provides insight into user behaviors and delivers compelling visuals. One can accurately track and observe a subject's gaze on a computer monitor in real time and aggregate and analyze this data across subjects. Researchers often instruct participants to "think out loud," to gain a deeper understanding of reasons behind user experience issues. Eye tracking helps complete the behavioral picture, placing the researcher even closer to the subject's thought process, intentions, and reactions.

However, eye tracking introduces its own challenges and limitations. Current eye trackers have progressed greatly from previous iterations, no longer requiring special glasses or lengthy calibration. Nevertheless, incorporating eye tracking into a qualitative study still isn't a plug-and-play, seamless solution. A wide range of approaches to testing set-up and data analysis need to be considered, based on the testing stimuli and the research objectives.

For those of you familiar with eye tracking research, but who have yet to incorporate it into your own studies, we will span all phases of a full study. We'll cover best practices and lessons learned for project planning, testing set-up, moderation, observation, data analysis, and presentation of results. We will include methodology-specific findings and case studies drawn from the experiences of several AnswerLab researchers across a range of test stimuli, including traditional web sites, on-line videos, on-line advertising, and software applications.