More Eye Tracking Challenges

In the previous article, we looked at some of the weaknesses with eye tracking as a market research technique. Today, we'll continue looking at some of these weaknesses and end with some concluding thoughts.

Eye Tracking Machinery As a Variable One problem that those in the eye tracking industry prefer not to talk about is how the machinery involved in eye tracking affects the data. It would be erroneous to claim that eye tracking cannot be accurate because of the machinery. It can.

Eye tracking often corresponds to involuntary eye movements, and since many of those movements cannot be controlled, they'll bring very useful data. But assuming that because it's a machine that it cannot be biased is also erroneous. Subjects that go through eye tracking know that they're in a machine, and that something is monitoring them, and potentially that their eye movements are being studied.

That is going to affect the data. It may be because the user is looking for something they think they're expected to see, or that the machinery itself is affecting where they want to look. Most eye tracking technology cannot account for peripheral vision either, and that can potentially take a great deal of information away.

Regardless of the cause, it can easily have an effect on the data and ultimately on your conclusions. The technology is very interesting, but it's important to remember that it's still prone to observer effects and technological limitations just like every other type of research. Data Interpretation Data interpretation can also be extremely difficult.

Eye tracking only tells you where they looked, when, and for how long. It does not tell you what they gleamed from where they look, how that information recorded in their brain, etc. That makes interpreting the data prone to errors, which reduce the value of receiving that data.

Eye tracking does, unfortunately, have a number of weaknesses. But what you should conclude from these weaknesses is that eye tracking is not valuable alone. As a complementary piece to traditional and better forms of data collection, eye tracking can be extremely useful.

It certainly provides information that cannot be gleamed from other sources. Still, it needs to be viewed as just a small part of a much larger puzzle, as if you depend on it too much and ignore other data sources, you're going to miss a lot of information.