Concerning Eye Tracking

I’ve been doing a heck of a lot of industry research recently and I came upon some vehement rants about the quality and value (or perceived lack thereof)  in the use of eye tracking.  Some of that is along technical/insight lines, but there’s plenty of talk about eye tracking not being “worth the extra cost”.

Here at Enquiro we operate a little differently. Eye tracking is an ingrained part of our Usability studies, and we’ve built a strong reputation on our ability to get the best out of eye tracking technology. We don’t use eye tracking as a $30k upsell to lab based studies. It’s a critical component of our studies and just another tool in our Usability methodology. Whether its’ value is actually 5% or 30% of the total insight and value we create from a study is debatable. It’s certainly not the majority of the value, as that comes from our rounded insight into user behaviour, intent, and other contextual elements.  But we think that without the use of eye tracking, Usability practitioners are “unable to see what participants aren’t able to see”. There’s a degree of reliance on participant recall and self reporting, which has a certain level of inherent Hawthorne effect, social desirability, and central tendency.  In our mix we add eye tracking, and other hard metrics such as time to complete task, and task pass/fail, to create assessments.

So, if you’re being oversold on eye tracking, perhaps it’s the approach that’s wrong and not the methodology itself.