Eye-Tracking of Multiple Images

A user experience expert will often want to know where users’ eyes are going on a page. The early equipment for “eye tracking” or “eye gazing” was cumbersome and unpleasant for users, but I’m seeing a lot of work being done nowadays with lighter and more easily available gear. This is an example of one research report on eye-tracking I ran across recently: http://psychology.wichita.edu/surl/usabilitynews/91/eyegaze.html

Eye tracking maps are often known in the user experience trade as “heat maps”, because most of the time they’re shown as websites with superimposed patches of color that go from light blue to blazing red, depending on how long a user has stared at each spot. Current research is revealing interesting things about how people look at sites. Text almost always shows an F-shaped pattern of scan. We’ve known for a long time that visitors don’t read text online, but scan instead. This is old news. But the research reported by Usability News looked into patterns of search on pages with lots of images, and there the gaze patterns break up rapidly into individualistic styles, especially when searching for something in particular. Otherwise, when browsing visitors show much the same orderly left-right, up-and-down zigzag pattern we’d expect to see. During visual search of multiple images, the eye hops rapidly about in unpredictable patterns as the brain works in overdrive to spot patterns, just as it might in an unfamiliar room with too much furniture.

The research didn’t investigate further, but from my own experience I’d say that the hippity-hoppity effect can be neutralized with proper use of boxing, labels, heads, and other clues that let the visitor quickly narrow down choices.