Tutorials

Eye tracking, as a complement to usability testing, is often overlooked as being expensive and time-consuming. This half-day tutorial will introduce eye tracking fundamentals and strategies for applying it to usability testing. A case study, demonstrating how eye tracking can be used to enhance the discount usability toolbox, will be discussed.

PARTICIPANT KNOWLEDGE AND EXPERIENCE EXPECTED

Participants should be familiar with usability testing of hardware or software. No prior knowledge of eye movement or eye tracking is expected.

GOALS FOR THE SESSION:

Participants in this tutorial will:

• Understand the fundamentals of eye movements and their relationship to cognition
• Be able to compare the various types of eye tracking equipment
• Understand the variety of applications in which eye tracking may be applied
• Specify how eye tracking in usability testing could enhance problem understanding and solution discovery
• Be able to describe practical techniques for data analysis when using eye tracking
• Be able to recommend how to effectively and efficiently include eye tracking into the usability testing process

HOW THIS TUTORIAL WILL BE CONDUCTED

Interactive exercises and discussions will be woven into the PowerPoint presentations. Audio and video clips will be used to illustrate concepts and also as a component of the group exercises. We will have eye tracking apparatus available for demonstration purposes. The participants will actively engage in exercises and discussions for one-third of the tutorial.

TUTORIAL SCHEDULE WITH TIME ALLOCATION

DETAILED DESCRIPTION OF TUTORIAL

6:30 – 6:45       Introduction and Overview (15 minutes)

During the introduction and overview, participants will describe their experience conducting usability tests and what they usually learn from these tests. Then, the instructors will discuss the following topics:

• Problems that are difficult to uncover and what might their characteristics be
• How eye tracking can be applied to enhance usability testing
• Eye tracking as a component of the usability testing process

6:45 – 7:15       History of eye tracking (30 minutes)

This session will focus on the key foundational studies and methodologies in eye movement analysis. Topics covered in this section include:

• Buswell’s investigation of image viewing
• Yarbus’ demonstration that eye movements are indicators of attention and cognition
• Fitts’ application of eye tracking to human factors and usability
• Historical methods

7:15 – 7:25      Exercises:   Visual perception and eye movements (10 minutes)

There will be several brief exercises designed to demonstrate the major types of eye movements.   Working in pairs, participants will use stimuli that will evoke different eye movements: saccades (the rapid movement from one stable gaze to a new point), smooth pursuit (made to stabilize the image of small, moving objects), VOR (made to stabilize the image as the head is moved), vergence (made to objects as they approach or recede), and and optokinetic movements (made to large objects that move in the visual field).

Participants will explore the limits of peripheral vision using stimuli that vary in size, motion, color, etc. In addition to the limits imposed by the optics and structure of the eye, vision is constrained by central limitations as well.   Participants will perform exercises that illustrate the limits of internal representation and visual memory.

7:25 – 8:00      Types of eye trackers and theory of operation (35 minutes)

In this session the various types of eye tracking hardware and their use will be described. Some representative eye tracker designs include:

• Video-based
  • Head-mounted
  • Remote
  • Portable
  • Wearable
• Analog/optical
• Limbus
• Magnetic search coil
• Dual Purkinje

8:00 – 8:30      BREAK

8:30-8:45    Demonstration of an eye tracker and sample video clips (15 minutes)

In this session a portable head-mounted eye tracker will be demonstrated, with audience participation. Several sample videos of various types of usability testing applications will be shown. These include:

• Digital camera use
• Interaction with multimedia software
• Assembly of mechanical components
• Image quality judgments
• Image editing
• Driving

8:45-8:55        Case Study : Introduction (10 minutes)

The case study used in this session will be a usability test in which eye tracking was used on a subset of participants. The study tested three multimedia interfaces designed to support the completion of a complex task – the set-up of an inkjet printer. The focus of the study was to explore the temporal relationship between text and animated graphics.

8:55-9:15       Exercise: Group analysis of over-the-shoulder and eye tracking clips (20 minutes)

Groups of four participants will first view over-the-shoulder clips then eye tracking clips of the same task for this case study.   Instructors will work with groups to help them discover differences and to illustrate how eye tracking enhances understanding of observed usability problems. Instructors will summarize group findings.

9:15-9:30      Case Study: Findings and discussion and wrap-up (15 minutes)

Instructors will present research findings for this study, particularly those from the eye tracking analysis. Data analysis methods will be described and illustrated.   The topics will include:

• Defining areas of interest
• Data encoding
• Qualitative and quantitative data analysis
• Discount methods – keeping eye tracking affordable and manageable

SPEAKER BIOS

Jeff B. Pelz, PhD

Associate Professor

Center for Imaging Science, Rochester Institute of Technology

Dr. Pelz is Director of the Visual Perception Laboratory at the Carlson Center for Imaging Science at the Rochester Institute of Technology and teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in imaging, visual perception, and optics. His research focuses on the development and use of unique eyetracking instrumentation to study how humans extract and use information from images and the environment to guide actions and make decisions. The RIT Wearable Eyetracker, developed in the Visual Perception Lab, allows studies of extended, complex tasks in the real world. His research at RIT has been funded by industrial partners, the New York State Office of Science, Technology, and Academic Research, the Naval Research Laboratories, and the National Science Foundation.

In addition to his appointment at RIT, Dr. Pelz serves as an adjunct research professor at the University of Rochester, and is a member of the Vision Sciences Society, SPIE, and IS&T.

Evelyn P. Rozanski, PhD

Professor

Rochester Institute of Technology

Dr. Rozanski is a Professor of Information Technology at the Rochester Institute of Technology. She has applied her experience in programming, database implementation, computer graphics, animation and multimedia into the development of undergraduate and graduate human-computer interaction (HCI) curricula. Her primary teaching areas are HCI, usability testing, usability engineering, human factors, interface design, and CSCW and groupware. She has advised several master's projects and theses.

Her most recent research projects include developing guidelines for remote usability testing, studying the impact of eye tracking on usability testing, and measuring the learnability of edutainment systems. She is the recipient of several grants and is currently co-authoring a book on cognitive psychology and interface design. Dr. Rozanski has published several papers and presented at national and international computing and eye movement conferences in the areas of HCI, usability engineering, and Java. She regularly attends SIGCHI and SIGITE conferences, and is a course reviewer for SIGGRAPH.

Anne R. Haake, PhD

Assistant Professor

Rochester Institute of Technology

Dr. Haake has taught and conducted research at RIT and The University of Rochester. Her primary teaching and research areas are Human-Computer Interaction (human factors, interface design, usability testing) and Bioinformatics (biological databases, user-centered design and usability testing). She teaches undergraduate and graduate courses at RIT and has advised several master's projects and theses.

Current research projects include the use of eye tracking in usability testing, eye tracking to measure learnability, adaptation of remote usability testing methods for education, and design of a usable database system for skin cancer studies. Her research at RIT has been funded by the National Science Foundation and by industrial partners. Dr. Haake is a member of the UPA.