Tobii EyeTracking's List: Tobii White Papers

Eye tracking as a tool in package and shelf testing using Tobii Eye Trackers.

Studying Web Pages Using Eye Tracking

Research has shown that incorporating eye tracking in usability research can provide certain benefits compared with traditional usability testing. There are various methodologies available when conducting research using eye trackers. This paper presents the results of a study aimed to compare the outcomes from four different retrospective think aloud (RTA) methods in a web usability study: an un-cued RTA, a video cued RTA, a gaze plot cued RTA, and a gaze video cued RTA. Results indicate that using any kind of cue produces more words, comments and allows participants to identify more usability issues compared with not using any cues at all. The findings also suggest that using a gaze plot or gaze video cue stimulates participants to produce the highest number of words and comments, and mention more usability problems.

Eye tracking commonly refers to the technique used to record and measure eye movements. In the last two to three decades we have witnessed a rapid evolution in eye tracking technology with systems becoming easier to operate and less intrusive to the test subjects. As a consequence the user base has also expanded with eye tracking being used more commonly in different research and commercial projects. The aim of this paper is to give a brief introduction to the human visual system, and to explain eye movements are recorded and processed by Tobii Eye Trackers. Some basic concepts and issues related to remote eye tracking and eye movement data interpretation are also briefly discussed.

Executive Summary
With a worldwide increase in use of mobile devices, the interest for eye‐tracking the use of such has grown as well. Eye tracking can give information regarding a number of things, e.g. how well a graphical interface works, where on a physical device the user look for certain things such as buttons, and how the user’s attention shifts between the different parts of the phone when interacting with it. However, eye tracking small devices is not an uncomplicated task. Because of the way the human eye works, we can see a large part of the mobile device even if only one fixation has been registered by the eye tracker. Also the accuracy of the eye tracker (which is about 0.5° for all Tobii models) plays a more significant role the smaller the interface to be eye tracked becomes. In addition, as the mobile device is three dimensional, eye tracking interaction with it can result in data offsets and errors if not set up properly. In order to overcome these issues, several different setups have been developed. In our study, we tested three of these which we judged to be most practical and to provide the most robust data.