Caught in Eye Trackers’ Blind Spots: Adapting Vision Studies to Ethnographic Field Research

Abstract

Although eye tracking has been used to analyze user interfaces, the technology poses numerous challenges when applied to environments in which people move, work, and interact. Aren’t eye trackers limited to studying two-dimensional planes? How might the device help to understand activities that are not exclusively visual? These questions are integral to ethnography, the observational study of peoples’ interactions with products, processes, and places. We offer answers by way of two bodies of research. The first was conducted to optimize Instructions for Use (IFUs) for medical devices. The second was an exploratory study conducted to adapt eye trackers to manual tasks. The objective was to cultivate interpretive methods for evaluating visual and non-visual perception in eye-tracking data (i.e., fixation duration, gaze plots, heat maps). We suggest that the latter body of research illuminates new opportunities for ethnographic fieldwork to examine how medical professionals move their bodies when simultaneously carrying out procedures and viewing visual systems.