Eyetracking studies are really expensive, but mouse tracking can be done just by dropping some Javascript into a page. How close can we approximate the results from an costly eyetracking study just using cheap and easily implemented mouse tracking?
From the paper:
Eye tracking can provide insights into users’ behaviour while using the search results page, but eye tracking equipment is expensive and can only be used for studies where the user is physically present. The equipment also requires calibration, adding overhead to studies.The work is just exploratory -- concluding only that mouse tracking "definitely [shows] potential as a way to estimate which results ... the user has considered before deciding where to click" -- but does have interesting results on the relationship between mouse and eye movements. It also reports on common mouse moving patterns they saw searchers do when considering on which search result to click.
In contrast, the coordinates of mouse movements on a web page can be collected accurately and easily, in a way that is transparent to the user. This means that it can be used in studies involving a number of participants working simultaneously, or remotely by client-side implementations – greatly increasing the volume and variety of data available.
To capture mouse movements, we used ... a piece of Javascript code at the top of every Google search results page visited. This Javascript code captured the user’s mouse coordinates (and the ID of the HTML element the mouse was over) at 100 millisecond intervals, and submitted the gathered data, with timestamps, into a MySQL database every 2 seconds (or when the user left the Google search results page).
I am familiar with mouse tracking tool and technique but is not having idea about eye tracking. This article gave me an idea about it. Thanks for discussing about it.
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