Welcome to the Usable Apps Blog

Joe Goldberg, Principal Research Scientist - Oracle Applications User Experience

What do your eyes know that your mind doesn't?  More than you might think. You may not realize it, but when you use a computer, your eyes are constantly moving, pausing, and responding to visual features within Web sites and applications. At Oracle, we study these frequent eye movements to help us improve the usability of applications. This technique, known as eye tracking, helps us understand how people search for information on a Web page or within an application window and what visual details may be confusing.  By tracking eye movements, we can determine, for example, whether or not users look at corporate branding, whether they start searching in the left column of a Web page, or whether portlet titles may be confusing.

Eye tracking techniques have advanced significantly over the past 50 years. Using todays technologies, eye tracking can reveal a users visual gazepoint to an accuracy within about a quarter of an inch. Using special systems designed for eye tracking, users sit in front of a display and follow a small moving dot with their eyes to calibrate the system. Invisible eye-tracking cameras follow the users eyes as they navigate the applications on the system. The cameras are so robust that the system can track a users eyes as they move around in front of the display, and can even recapture eye movements if the user walks away and returns to the system at a later time. 

Eye tracking systems are available from companies such as Applied Science Labs, Tobii, LC Technologies, and SR Research. These systems can be expensive, ranging from $20,000-$50,000 each, and can require significant technical expertise to set up. Eye tracking services are also available from companies such as EyeTools, UserCentric, EyeTracking, and Etre.

The most challenging aspect of eye tracking is in analyzing and interpreting the huge amount of data that is generated in just a few seconds. Eye tracking specialists are working on a number of innovations in this area of study to help in data analysis and interpretation. Work is underway to develop standard metrics from eye tracking that are associated with usability. Algorithms are being developed that will determine the complexity and regularity of a users search on a display. There are also efforts being made to compare mathematically one users search path to another users search path for the same task. Visualization methods are being developed to allow product teams and executives to see where groups of users look on displays while conducting tasks.

In the near future, eye tracking is expected to become a regular and automated addition to usability evaluations. Eye tracking has the unique ability to get inside the users mind to understand their search strategies while using applications. Oracle is at the forefront of this effort and continues to innovate usability evaluation methods.