The comparison study of usability test methodology based on eye-tracking technology

Abstract

Eye-tracking technology, as an objective-recording method of user’s eye movement data, has widely been applied in human–computer interface usability test. The quantitative analysis of eye movement data is good at comparing different UI designs; however, it can hardly probe the influential factors of usability issues from a UCD perspective. This research aimed at improving the validity of usability test, and tried to fill in the gap of merely applying eye movement data in usability test. In this paper, we compared the characteristics and differences of concurrent and retrospective think-aloud on UI usability evaluation, which were combined with eye-tracking system. We found that concurrent think-aloud would interfere users during the tests, thus increased their mental stress and cognitive workload, which suits assessing simple-operation and low-cognitive-workload tasks; the retrospective think-aloud enables user to operate more naturally, thus is proper for more complex task chain testing. Moreover, the retrospective think-aloud is more efficient for analyzing the cognitive factors of usability issues in-depth.