Added Value of Eye Tracking in Usability Studies: Expert and Non-expert Participants

This paper investigates the value of eye tracking in evaluating the usability of a Learning Management System, at an open distance learning university where the users’ computer and Web skills vary significantly. Eye tracking utilize the users’ eye movements, while doing a task, to provide information about the nature, sequence and timing of the cognitive operations that took place. This information supplements, but does not replace standard usability testing with observations. This forces the questions of when the added value of eye tracking justifies the added cost and resources. Existing research has indicated significant differences in the usability experienced by experts and non-experts on the same system. The aim of this paper is to go one step further and shed light on the type and severity of the usability problems experienced by non-expert users. Usability testing with eye tracking is a resource intensive method but our findings indicate that eye tracking adds concise, summarised evidence of usability problems that justifies the cost when testing special groups such as users deficient in Web and computer skills. The contribution of this paper is to highlight the added value of eye tracking as a usability evaluation method in working with Web non-expert users. Furthermore, the findings improve our understanding of the knowledge differences between expert and non-expert Web users and the practical challenges involved in working with non-expert users.