Eye Tracking and clicks services

Several consulting companies currently sell evaluation services using eye tracking to graphic design houses and web content creators among others.

http://www.clicktale.com

http://www.eyetools.com

http://www.factone.com

http://www.veridicalresearch.com

http://www.tobii.com/

http://www.simpleusability.com

http://crazyegg.com/

http://www.interactive-minds.com/

http://www.clickdensity.com

By ANTHONY SANTELLA:
THE ART OF SEEING: VISUAL PERCEPTION IN DESIGN
AND EVALUATION OF NON-PHOTOREALISTIC RENDERING

Much of the knowledge above about human eye motion has been gained through the use of eye-tracking. A system measures a viewer’s eye in one of several manners and records the point where it is looking, termed the point of regard or POR.

Eye position has been used as a cursor for selection tasks in a GUI [Sibert and Jacob, 2000]. They have also been used to indicate a users’ attention to others in a videoconferencing environment [Vertegaal, 1999].
Another class of use, related to ours, uses POR to control simplifying images or scenes for efficiency purposes. Knowing where a user looks enables pruning of information that is not perceptible, and need not be transmitted in a video stream [Duchowski, 2000].

Eye tracking has been used to evaluate the effectiveness of informational
displays including application interfaces [Crowe and Narayanan, 2000],
web pages [Goldberg et al., 2002], and air traffic control systems [Mulligan, 2002]. As mentioned earlier, eye movements may even reveal information that viewers are trying to report, but cannot, because it is not consciously available.

Experiments have shown that professional radiologists examining slides look longer at locations where tumors are present, even when they fail to identify and report them [Mello-Thoms et al., 2002].
In the future, this might hold the promise of computer assisted technologies to avoid such mistakes.