Identifying web usability problems from eye-tracking data

By Claudia Ehmke, Stephanie M. Wilson. British Computer Society Conference on Human-Computer Interaction, 2007

294 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Eye-tracking research is increasingly used to supplement usability tests in both commercial and academic practice. However, while there has been research into links between eye-tracking metrics and usability problems, this has so far fallen short of establishing a general correlation scheme between the two. Consequently, practitioners are left to make subjective judgements when interpreting eye-tracking data. We address the lack of general guidance by proposing an initial correlation scheme based on data from an exploratory study which aimed to find a wide range of possible correlations between usability problems and eye-tracking patterns. User testing of two websites was conducted and a set of diverse usability problems was extracted from the data; these were then analysed and some were correlated with users' eye-tracking patterns. In addition to this initial correlation scheme, a further finding from this study is that usability problems are connected to not just a single eye-tracking pattern, but to a specific sequence of patterns. This sequence of patterns seems to arise from different coping strategies that users develop when a problem is experienced.

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/a286258da0ac7fd5c9d0cbc5c10760bd05035aeb

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Citations in the corpus

Agent Reasoning Transparency’s Effect on Operator Workload (2016, background): “The number of fixations has been shown to correlate positively with search difficulty (Ehmke & Wilson, 2007) and negatively with search efficiency and increased mental workload (Goldberg & Kotval, 1999; Van Orden, Jung, & Makeig, 2000).”
Eye Movement Monitoring as a Process Tracing Methodology in Decision Making Research (2011, background): “…in the context of usability research, where the pattern of eye movements can yield insight into the processing steps taken by users (for a review of eye tracking in the field of usability see Ehmke & Wilson, 2007; for a more general review of eye tracking in applied contexts, see Duchowski, 2002).”
Standardization of Automated Analyses of Oculomotor Fixation and Saccadic Behaviors (2010, unknown): “pertaining to human–computer interaction [13]–[18], psychology [19]–[21], and usability [22]–[24].”