Eyetracking Research
Findings from Nielsen Norman Group's usability studies using eye tracking technology.
Book"Eyetracking Web Usability", New Riders PressDecember 14, 2009 ISBN-10: 0-321-49836-4 ISBN-13: 978-0-321-49836-6
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Book excerpt: the first 32 pages of Chapter 6 (free download — warning: 26 MB PDF file). Read online through Safari Books. Articles
Reports
Background
Example of an eyetracking "heatmap" that shows how much users looked at different parts of a Web page. Areas where users looked the most are colored red; the yellow areas indicate fewer fixations, followed by the least-viewed blue areas. Gray areas didn't attract any fixations. The above example is from a website's "About Us" pages. The heatmap clearly shows users' tendency to read in an "F" pattern, and their focus on information that's presented in bulleted lists. In this case, there's also a small amount of attention to the "see also" area, but no viewing of the promotions in the rightmost column. (See our separate research project for detailed guidelines for the design of "About Us" areas of corporate websites.)
Our full-day seminar on Fundamental Guidelines for Web Usability includes many detailed results from our eyetracking studies (and from many other studies), often shown as slow-motion gaze replay videos. The seminar is available for in-house presentation at your company ($9,000+travel). If interested, contact
The eyetracking equipment we use for our research. Looks like a normal computer, doesn't it? Of course, that's exactly the point, because we want users to work normally. The cameras and infrared emitters are hidden behind small dark windows at the top and bottom of the monitor. We use a separate small webcam to capture the user's facial expressions (sitting on the left loudspeaker), but even that is fairly unobtrusive, and test participants quickly tune it out. Book Table of Contents
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Press CoverageTIME MagazineWhy We Look at Some Web Ads and Not Others
USA Today
Poynter Institute
MediaPost
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