We’re learning about eye-tracking this week. Since this technology is relatively new and so quickly developing, I did some independent research of where eye-tracking is today.
This video is pretty fun—where do women look when they look at men? There’s a similar video of men looking at women at the end. The problem with these experiments is, of course, the participants are aware of being eye-tracked and know the “right” way to behave societally. I should think this experiment would work better having participants remain private from the experiment subjects (although still not fool-proof, since again, they know they’re being monitored). This isn’t a usability study, but it does show some of the drawbacks of eye-tracking research.
This is an interesting way of using eye-tracking, to distinguish the differences between the way ASD-diagnosed children (autism spectrum disorder) observed a scene as opposed to undiagnosed children. The eye-tracking app isn’t used to diagnose ASD, although it had a pretty high predictive rate of 93.96%. Very interesting.
As eye-tracking technology becomes less obtrusive, I can see companies begin to implement it so that — like Google tracks my web search usage — I eventually forget it’s there and behave naturally. That’s when they’ll do some solid UXD research.
Note: This blog was written during Usability II week 6.
Comment