scottmacleodsblog

I just re-watched Rain Man and realized that a lot of that movie can be viewed as a study in eyetracking. Eyetracking in scenes intended to be real life as opposed to a website, but eyetracking nonetheless. Many of the scenes are montages of what Dustin Hoffman’s character’s eye is attracted to. Many of the images are fascinating for their inhuman, mechanical repetition, speed, and play of light. But, this is not the main story, and it takes director Barry Levinson’s focus to include the eyetracking, but also build it coherently into the story.

I like what I’ve learned about eyetracking so far. First, that it seems that it has to be viewed as a real art form in order to be done well. Ever since I read Daniel Pink’s A Whole New Mind, I’ve been on the lookout for things that can’t be learned by rote, are difficult to automate and require qualitative rather than quantitative analysis. Quantitative analysis still might be a part of eyetracking, but I like how Aaron reminded us in the intro video for this week, that statistically valid quantitative results aren’t necessary to learn a lot about a site when using eyetracking.

The biggest problem I see with eyetracking, heatmaps, gaze plots, etc. is the cost. It’s expensive to get the equipment, and even more expensive in terms of additional salary, to get people who know enough of the “art form” side of the studies to make good use of someone (assuming you’ve even got someone doing UX hiring who at least knows what questions to ask, in order to find, in Pink’s terms, a whole new mind – or at least a right-brained, UX person) who can work with the technology.

Otherwise, I think you end up with a lot of participants who, while in an eyetracking study (I know I’m like this), act like Rain Man in the Las Vegas casino scene. Everything is very sparkly, definitely very twinkly. And without the skills to know whether the sparkly and the shiny are important or not to the overall story, you may end up with results that go nowhere, just constantly trying to figure out who’s on first.

This entry was posted on August 11, 2013 at 11:35 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.