Week 27 @ KSU's UXD Program - Eye Tracking Usability
I've never used eye tracking software, I knew little to nothing before this week and likely won't use it for a long time in my professional work since the cost benefit tradeoff is so poor. That doesn't mean I don't think it's really cool and helpful, but after this week's readings it is pretty clear that the cost and difficulty in running an eye tracking usability is not the way to go for someone who is the sole UX professional at their company like myself. Reading that eye tracking studies are completely impractical for my situation, was oddly very practical for me. Now I know there are better ways to capture usability with my current resources.
One of the great parts of the reading from Jakob Nielsen was going over some basic usability testing methods, such as what questions to use on a Likert scale and the psychology behind it -
- How easy or difficult was it to complete the task?
- Allows people to say how much trouble they had
- How satisfying or unsatisfying was it to work on this task?
- This allows people to express how interesting or helpful the task was
- How confident or not confident are you that you completed the task?
- This captures the situations in which people were confused about the process or task.
This is great information and can be used for for a wide variety of usability studies. There were plenty more examples of best practices in the first two chapters of Eye Tracking Web Usability, but those questions and Likert Scale format I will be using this week when I set up some remote mobile research tasks for work. Anytime I get to use the information I learned in class into my job immediately just rejuvenates me even more.
*The video was great this week, probably one of the best in this program because it showed how the tool worked in context. Having a professor read about eye tracking while having the software capture their eyes' movements was great. It made me realize how complex this type of study is in real time and got me to understand the basics of how it worked before any readings.