27 April 2012. 9.30am to 4.30pm, 301, 15 Lime Street, King Street Wharf, Sydney NSW 2000

$595 + gst (lunch provided)
Book usability testing training now by emailing jbreeze@ObjectiveDigital.com

Do you want to learn about usability testing, what it involves and how to do it?

Gain confidence in usability testing through our hands-on, interactive course on usability testing.

During our one-day interactive usability testing course you will:

• Learn what’s involved in usability testing
• Grow your understanding of usability and its heuristics
• Find out how to plan for a usability test and recruit the right respondents
• Learn how to prepare a testing script
• Discover how to run a testing session
• Understand how to evaluate results and report on usability testing tests
• Learn more about the logistics and technologies of usability testing
• Be given guidelines and tips for successful testing
• Receive templates that cover each of the steps involved in usability testing.

To put into practice what you learn, you’ll complete a series of exercises throughout the day ranging from how to plan a testing script to uncovering usability issues. At the end of the day you will moderate your own usability test and aso be a participant of one.

You will leave the course having gained a deeper understanding of how to plan, prepare, run, analyse and report on usability testing whether this is in a management capacity role or actually running usability testing yourself.

You will also be provided with a usability testing course pack that holds all the templates and materials you will need to run your own sessions.

Our usability testing course has a maximum of 12 participants to keep it interactive, fun and informal.

Who should attend:

• Marketers
• Web developers
• Designers
• Business analysts
• Online communications managers
• IT and web managers
• Testers
• Online content owners and creators
• Project managers

Book usability testing training now by emailing jbreeze@ObjectiveDigital.com

The workshop fee will include morning tea, lunch and afternoon tea. The workshop will be held at 301, 15 Lime St, Sydney from 9.30am to 4.30pm.

Book here

May 31^st – June 1^st 2012
CQUniversity Australia
Noosaville, QLD, Australia

EyeTrack Australia 2012 is the first Australasian conference devoted exclusively to cross-disciplinary eye movement research. By bringing together leading researchers from academia and industry, this conference will support collaboration and knowledge building both within the Australasian eye-tracking sector and the larger global community. The conference committee is pleased to announce that a number of national and international scholars using eye-tracking and user experience methodologies will present cutting edge keynote presentations.

Important Dates 2012

Book here

Conference Venue

ETA 2012 will be held at the CQUniversity Australia campus in Noosaville, Queensland, on Australia’s Sunshine Coast.

Conference Theme

Innovation, Collaboration, and Application.  Eye movement research is conducted in a variety of contexts, creating opportunities for cooperation and collaboration between scholars and researchers across disciplines and institutions. This mixture of methodologies, backgrounds, and technologies can create a strong potential for true innovation, true collaboration and quality application. Publications from this conference, and the conference itself, will serve as the initiator for an Australasia-wide network.

General Areas of Interest

• Cooperation and Collaboration. Lessons learned in conducting eye movement research across multiple institutions, settings, and disciplines.
• Technological Advances. Innovative uses of existing technology as well as pioneering implementation of new technology in a range of research contexts and disciplines.
• Eye Tracking Methodologies, Methods, and Applications. Reports of research projects from a range of disciplines.
• Data Analysis and Interpretation. Key challenges and important discoveries in moving from raw data to findings.
• Building and Maintaining Research Trajectories. Challenges and opportunities related to situating individual research efforts in a larger research context.

ETA 2012 Symposium on EEG and Eye Movement Co-Registration

The aim of this symposium, part of the inaugural Australian eye tracking conference (ETA2012) organised by CQUniversity Australia, is to bring together researchers in the region who are working on EEG-EM co-registration. Submission topics are not restricted to the area of reading. The symposium will have as a guest speaker, Reinhold Kliegl from the University of Potsdam, who has worked extensively in reading research including EEG-EM co-registration. Additional contributions are now invited from other researchers working in the co-registration field.

Pre-Conference Training

On May 30^th, the day preceding the conference, conference attendees are invited to register for a separate training event with Objective Eye Tracking and an eye tracking expert from Tobii in Sweden. This will be an opportunity to further develop your knowledge and skills in the use of these technologies.

Peer Review

Authors are invited to submit original contributions in the Full Paper format (up to 12 pages) and Short Paper format (up to 4 pages). All papers will undergo a double blind peer review process which will assess originality, quality, and relevance to eye movement research. Submission formats and instructions are available on the Call for Papers page.

Book here

Sponsorship

This conference is co-sponsored by CQUniversity Australia and Objective Eye Tracking, which offers Tobiiproducts throughout Australasia.

Conference Chair Associate Professor Mike Horsley Director, Learning & Teaching Education Research Centre CQUniversity Australia Email: m.horsley@cqu.edu.au

EyeTrack Australia Conference Coordinator Dr. Matt Eliot CQUniversity Australia Email: m.eliot@cqu.edu.au Phone: +61 (07) 5440 7039 Mobile: +61 417667829

Here’s a video thanks to Engagdet

Read the press release

The NEW Tobii eye tracking glasses allow wearers to walk around freely, making it easier for researchers to create a real-world environment in which to capture natural user behaviour.

Objective are running 2 launch events to demonstrate the NEW Tobii eye tracking glasses. We will also demonstrate the Attention Tool eye tracking software for market research.

International guest speaker, film director and eye tracking expert, Juan Pablo Rodriguez from EyeOnMedia will be presenting case studies on his use of eye tracking within market research.

Book your place!

Mon Nov 29th, 5pm – 6.30pm Level 1, 530 Lonsdale St, Melbourne

Thur Dec 2nd, 5pm – 6.30pm Level 10, 220 George Street, Sydney

(Drinks and light refreshments will be provided) 

Please RSVP by emailing jbreeze@ObjectiveDigital.com

Objective is the Australasian reseller for Tobii eye tracking hardware and software and iMotions Attention Tool eye tracking software.

Tobii Technology is the world leader in eye tracking hardware and software www.Tobii.com

iMotions Attention Tool® is the world leading eye tracking software within market research and the application combines eye tracking metrics, reading metrics and emotion metrics.

Recently, our long term client, SAI GLOBAL Property Services (previously Espreon), needed to test its new, ‘game changing’, self service property settlement booking system with a representative sample of solicitors and legal practice managers.  These users are so hard to track down! We just couldn’t find any to book into a testing session at our lab in George St, Sydney.

So we went to them:

at the Australian Legal Practice Managers Association (ALPMA) Conference where SAI GLOBAL was sponsoring and had a booth.

This was a really successful method of accessing people who’s time is precious. In one day Joanna Lewis was able to test with 12 people in sessions ranging from 20 – 45 minutes. She accessed 5 solicitors, 2 legal practice managers  and 5 SAI GLOBAL employees. A perfect number to give us valuable feedback on the final version of their interactive and graphically designed prototype site. 

I went along to the session to help invite participants into the stand for the testing session while Joanna was busy. However, the SAI GLOBAL sales staff did my job for me! One woman in particular recruited all of the key users we needed!!  And recruiting was easy because people were keen to see the eye tracker in action!

Of course the Tobii T60 eye tracker that we used is portable and we could quickly set it up in the morning before people arrived.  We used the Retrospective Think Aloud (RTA) protocol [pdf].This meant that, whilst people were using the complex online application, we could leave them alone to focus on the task at hand.

We had originally planned to test the system using 2 tasks, but soon realised participants wanted to leave once the first task was completed.  So we got participants to complete the process straight through, as one task. When they were finished Joanna replayed them their eye gaze video to stimulate discussion and gain insights on how to improve the prototype. Final discussion questions also had to be speedy – just likes and dislikes.

Here’s a heat map that we created after the testing to demonstrate some of the findings to the SAI GLOBAL executive.

As a bonus for SAI GLOBAL, the eye tracker meant that sales staff could actively engage with customers during the conference and describe what Joanna was doing.  This helped get people into the stand and demonstrated that SAI GLOBAL care about how their applications are designed, making sure customers find it easy to use. Also, the sales staff were actively engaged in the research process. I am sure that they will use the experiences of the day regularly in future sales meetings! And we have already received feedback from a very happy CEO!

If you can drive a usability testing tool like Morae or Silverback; or if you can drive a design program, then you can use eye tracking software. If you can create an online survey or roll out a social network you can use eye tracking software. So long as it it a Tobii eye tracker.

Here’s two training videos on the Tobii Studio software:

If you want to use one at our EyeTrackLab for the day, let us know by emailing jbreeze@objectivedigital.com.

Of course, it is important that you have experience in usability test facilitation and setting up great research projects!

Visit our website for more user experience FAQs

On June 22, 2010 Tobii launched a new revolutionary eye tracker: Tobii Glasses. This is the first head mounted, or wearable eye tracker from Tobii. Just like all of the other eye trackers from Tobii, Glasses is taking eye tracking to the next level. Unlike other wearable eye tracking systems Glasses is very lightweight (Glasses 75 grams plus recording assistant 200 grams), just like wearing a pair of sun glasses and an iPod. This is not the only revolutionary thing about Tobii:

Glasses, the real leap forward is the ease of use and the ability to aggregate eye tracking data which enables you to conduct quantitative eye tracking studies which is really unique for a wearable eye tracker.  To be able to do this Tobii has developed a new technology called AOA-Track with small markers that emits infrared light. By placing these IR-markers around objects and/or areas you want to study in depth, Tobii Glasses automatically knows when a person is looking within these areas and will automatically aggregate the data from all the participants in an eye tracking study. This is truly amazing! Previously when doing this kind of research it has required a lot of manual coding work to be able to do this, now it all happens automatically and you are able to use the analysis software Tobii Studio to analyze the data just as if it was recorded with a stationary eye tracker. In other words you can create visualizations like heat maps and gaze plots, calculate statistics etc automatically with data from a Tobii Glasses recording.

The device also includes a microphone and of course a camera filming everything the participant is looking at so it can also be used for qualitative studies (you just watch the recording as a video with the gaze point overlaid) and might even enable new research methodologies, what do you say about “Concurrent Think Aloud Walking” in usability research for example!

To learn more about the Tobii Glass please visit these resources online:

Video about how to use Tobii Glasses for Market Research:
http://www.tobiiglasses.com/marketresearch/

Video about how to use Tobii Glasses in Scientific Research:

http://www.tobiiglasses.com/scientificresearch/

Tobii Glasses Product Leaflet (pdf)

Tobii Glasses product page on Tobii.com here

Examples

These are some examples from Tobii Glasses recordings Tobii did in a Supermarket.

Watch a shopper in a supermarket being eye tracked in the YouTube video below

This is a Gaze Plot showing how a person is searching for a product on the shampoo shelf. IR-markers have been placed on the shelf to enable us to collect the data.

This is another shelf, the heat map shows the aggregated data from 30 recordings and reveals where people look when deciding which product to buy. IR-markers have been placed on the shelf (try to find them!) to enable us to aggregate the data and make this heat map.

YouTube video describing Tobii Glasses

Eye Tracking: Best Way to Test Rich App Usability | UX Magazine

Eye tracking has recently been debated on many fronts, with a particular focus on the ways people misuse it, and how some use eye tracking only as a way to “wow” clients. In our experience, however, it’s invaluable in bringing to light key findings that are otherwise unattainable through other user testing methods. Eye tracking offers UX people the ability to:

• Leave a participant alone during a test to focus on the task at hand, and therefore
• Capture real physiological data about their conscious and unconscious experiences. This data is unique to eye tracking.

Eye Tracking for Rich Applications

Recently eye tracking has been heavily used in website design and testing. When I became involved about eight years ago, the sites tested were mainly flat HTML. Researchers were able to produce beautiful heat maps that were useful for comparing and optimising simple screen layouts and online advertising placements.

The invention of rich, interactive, and transactional interfaces, however, has meant producing eye tracking results is now more complex. Each interface has multiple states and people can interact in pretty much whatever way they like. People can choose their own way through a task to completion and the eye trackers can’t tell which state is what as a person’s eyes are tracked. Additional analysis is now required to separate these interactions, and fortunately eye tracking technologies have advanced to make this process relatively simple.

If this new level of sophisticated analysis is not achieved, this will result in eye tracking data being misused and eye tracking will retain (inappropriately) its novelty status.

Usability Testing Fraternities Lock Horns

Think Aloud

Think Aloud (TA) is an age-old usability testing method. People are asked to speak their thoughts, feelings, and opinions during a set of usability testing tasks. This is done with the help of the facilitator, who “skilfully interrupts” the process frequently to find out why people do particular things during the test.

In my opinion, when people are faced with lots of interactions on screen, considerable cognitive effort is required. Adding TA to this experience will inappropriately add more cognitive load to the task that would not normally be present. This can lead to misleading additional eye fixations and dwell times on outputs, which clouds the analysis. Often a poor facilitator will prompt users to the next stage (when was the last time someone knocked on your door and helped you find the right button when you browsed at home?), again spoiling the desired realism while testing.

We know there are three types of memory “storage” systems: sensory memory, short term, and long term. Our sensory memory retains an exact copy of what is seen or heard, and is generally thought to last between 300ms and a few seconds. Our short-term memory tends to remember between five and nine “items” (George Miller, et al) of information. If we start to talk about our actions in a TA protocol, these precious (milli) seconds and snapshots of information are quickly forgotten or overwritten. After that, what are they basing their commentary on?

Eye Tracking

There has been considerable debate about the usefulness of usability testing with eye tracking. Many TA proponents claim their methods, when carefully performed, will find enough issues compared with eye tracking, which they consider to be too difficult, time consuming, and expensive to bother about.

To my mind, this criticism arises from a situation where some people use eye tracking to make wild claims about how all websites should be designed. These can be found in numerous blog posts written that offer tips and guidelines. These include 23 Actionable Lessons From Eye-Tracking Studies, Web Form Design Guidelines: An Eyetracking Study, and Eyetracking Study Reveals 12 Website Tactics. These articles have been widely referenced and retweeted; however, they should be taken with a grain of salt. Without a clear understanding of the methodology used, the information should simply be seen as an investigative tool in your design process, not as the Holy Grail.

Of particular concern is Jakob Nielsen’s F-pattern research. This was produced in 2006 and I regularly hear it mentioned in design meetings in Australia. This study was done using the regular TA protocol, which means that participants’ eye gaze data is very likely not valid because they were talking to the experimenter during the study. Try doing an everyday task like driving, cooking, or cleaning while all along the way verbalising every little step, and see how your behaviour (actions, methods, or time to complete) is affected.

Retrospective Think Aloud

Retrospective Think Aloud is another usability testing method that has been used for many years. In this case, participants give their opinions of a task after it is completed and the interview is recorded for later reference. Of course, it is hard to remember what you did during a task.

Retrospective TA with eye tracking (RTA) is a method in which participants are quickly calibrated on the eye tracker and then asked to do the testing task without interruption from the facilitator. In fact, the facilitator can even leave the room during a test. Following the test, the facilitator immediately asks the participant to score their experience and then replays the eye gaze video of the participant’s experience to them. This replay of their eye gaze triggers the person’s memory of what they did, thereby mitigating the memory issue. Expanding on this, the eye gaze can also be removed to ask what the participant thought they looked at before revealing their actual interactions.

Think Eyetracking, an early adopter of the RTA eye tracking protocol (which they renamed PEEP), have published a jointly researched academic paper with Lancaster University, UK. Their academic article can be downloaded on the Think Eyetracking Blog. They also had a very popular blog post about it in 2008 that generated some controversy.

Below are some eye tracking heat maps created by Think Eyetracking that show a comparison of a Google search task done with TA (on the left) and RTA (on the right). Note the dramatic differences! It is obvious that the behaviour is very different, with long dwell times and numbers of fixations apparent in the TA output, probably caused by the participants staring at and browsing the screen while verbalising their actions.

Recently, Tobii Technology from Sweden created a unique feature in their Find out more about RTA on Scribd or watch this video:

Usability labs are set up to approximate real life. We regularly see experimenters set up their testing facilities like offices or lounge rooms to make the person feel at home. TA asks people to talk to someone while they are busy doing a task—where’s the real life in that?

Eye tracking is the only real way to test a rich application without distracting the participant.

See Where People Looked, Not Where They Think They Looked

Here are some examples from our recent work at Objective Digital.

We allow people to complete tasks in a focused way, and also obtain real physiological data about what they are doing. It is difficult to argue with and almost impossible to fake these measures. We are not making assumptions about what they looked at and in what order things captured their attention. Some recent client projects encouraged us to use eye tracking to identify:

1. Where do people look first?
2. What don’t they look at?
3. What they looked at before the usability issue occurred?
4. How people learn an interface?

1. Where Do People Look First?

Very simply, eye tracking can tell us exactly what caught people’s attention first on a screen. Jay Eskenazi put this very clearly in a comment on the IxDA forum in 2009:

Eye tracking measures unconscious behavior—and provides data that people simply cannot verbalize in other common user research methods, especially TA usability testing protocols. Decades of psychology research show that much human behavior occurs at an unconscious level.

The human eye, for example, can make up to 5 fixations per second and this occurs below people’s level of conscious awareness. So in a 30 second scan of a typical homepage, the customer may be looking at up to 150 items on the page. Your customers (or research participants) simply cannot verbally tell you where their eyes are going and this is exactly the value that good eye tracking data provides.

Our experience is that visual attention data IS correlated with behavioral performance metrics. If people don’t “see” something, then they are less likely to click it.

2. What They Don’t Look At

Case study 1: Eye tracking shows what things on the screen people didn’t look at. Importantly, the data revealed what space was being wasted in the design and what areas of the page were essentially ignored.

Recently, when we tested an internal CRM application for a finance company, eye tracking proved that customer service staff ignored the very information the company wanted them to focus on. In the task, they weren’t even required to click on the screen.

The image here shows clearly that in the first few seconds of usage staff focused primarily on the bottom right rather than the bottom left where they were meant to focus. This would not have been observable if simply interviewing them. Considering this screen is used 300,000 times per day, any improvements to the design that make the correct part of the screen more obvious will drive positive outcomes for the finance company’s customer service.

Joanna Lewis, whom I work with, recently wrote a blog post about what people ignore.

3. What They Looked at Before the Usability Issue Occurred

Only with eye tracking can we see all the options that people consider, even unconsciously, before starting and completing a specific task.

Eye tracking shows you where people immediately look on a screen. Yes, they can find a target and do a usability task just fine. But where did they look first, especially for ecommerce where time taken can force customers to leave you or stay? Rob Tannen puts this very clearly:

[Eye tracking] does have value as a secondary diagnostic tool. In the context of usability testing, eye tracking does not determine the presence of a usability problem, but helps determine what led to that problem in conjunction with performance data, facilitator observations and user self-reporting.

Case study 2: As the video clearly shows, this user was looking everywhere except at the Donate area on the right. After looking at the navigation both at the side and at the top, the rest of the page was viewed but at no point did the user focus on the Donate area in the main image. It clearly highlights the fact that this call-to-action does not stand out in the prototype, and users are also expecting to see something within the navigation. Equally, the heat map below gives an indication where all six people we tested would expect to see this link.

Case study 3: When users were asked to change one of the options on this screen, the eye tracking heat map below showed very clearly where they were expecting to go. People did not see the areas they were supposed to (indicated in red). Eye tracking of the first second they looked at the screen allowed us to make the site more efficient as it clearly indicated where the functionality should have been positioned.

The heat map below shows the first second of eye tracking on a prototype applicaiton. Users were heavily fixated on one area of the screen, and it can be assumed that this is where they were expecting to find the function they were asked to look for (the buttons).

This experience can also be seen in our financial institution case study.

How Do People Learn an Interface?

Eye tracking is also useful for change management and training when a new system is introduced to staff within a business.

Where do people look the first time they see an application? How about the second time, and the third time? Eye tracking shows very clearly how people learn to interact with a system.

Case study 4:
A new user visiting the website

The new user is seen to skip back and forth between the right hand side panel and the selections and information on the main part of the page to complete the task.

An expert user of the website

The expert user is highly focused and directed and completes the task with minimum effort.

This example was again from the banking CRM case study. The client even used an eye tracking video as part of the training package for customer service reps. It was used to show them the best way to look at the interface the instant a customer identifies themselves at a branch.

Role-Played Customer Service

The eye tracking data gathered from the CRM examples above was gathered during a simulated customer service interaction. The bank branch staff member was tracked during a 45-minute role-played customer interview. Afterward, the usability issues were discussed when the staff member’s eye gaze and screen interactions were replayed to him. I can’t think of any other way to do this type of test that essentially involves three people: participant, role-played customer, and facilitator.

Commonly Reported Eye Tracking Advantages

Eye tracking offers unique advantages above and beyond traditional TA. Other widely known advantages include:

1. A more relaxed testing environment where participants give feedback in their own time, and actually find more usability errors.
2. Executives like eye tracking because it produces compelling physiological data that can’t be argued with.
3. Real time eye tracking data also provides for a better observation experience. I frequently find that if I am observing a participant’s gaze data in real time while they complete their tasks, I am better engaged and glean more detailed insights about the user interface.

In TA, sometimes it can be very hard to see what a person is talking about during the test. I once mentioned this to a TA proponent and they suggested that if the TA is managed well it wouldn’t be a problem. During the test, they would have the test facilitator ask the participant to hover their mouse over the part of the screen they are describing so that the observers can see what is being discussed. I’m sorry, but this just means the participant gets even more distracted from the task at hand.