What is the difference between EYE tracking and MOUSE tracking?

The last few years in the market of usability are actively used such a convenient and good tool like mouse tracking, a system that allows you to track the movement of a visitor’s mouse on your site and the clicks made by it. In the Russian market, the main player in this area is Yandex.metric , which bought a web visitor that quickly gained popularity.

This tool is very convenient: it allows you to build an activity map on a page, highlighting with hot colors those areas where the mouse moved more actively and more often, a click map that shows which areas of the page were clicked more often. All this information can be a good source of information for identifying the comforts and weaknesses of your site.

And it’s quite natural that studios, usabilityists and website owners who are not familiar with eytrecking have a question: what is the difference between maps built using data tracking from metric maps and which system is better.

I must say that neither the one nor the other system is better or worse - they are just different. The metric is more convenient for some tasks, and eytreking is for others, and if properly applied, both can be quite successfully used to analyze the convenience of the site. But let's detail.
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Heat maps

It should be understood that the “heat map” is nothing more than a method of displaying information. Just in one case, the screenshot of the page is superimposed information on the intensity of the movement of the mouse, and in the other - on the movement of the eye. Those. in principle, these two cards are not connected at all with each other. With the same success, it is possible, for example, to impose on the page data on the speed of reading the text and also get a heat map.

Another thing is that there is a certain correlation between the movement of the eye and the movement of the mouse. But this correlation is quite ambiguous and not all users show it.

Correlation between gaze and mouse movement

I know of only one scientific (read, fairly objective) work that explored this question: movement on the web browsing . It says about the strict connection of the mouse with the eyes - 84-88%. (I would be grateful for links to other similar studies) But this article has two drawbacks.

First , it states that with a probability of 84%, if there was a cursor in some place on the page, then the site visitor looked there (not necessarily at the same time!), And with a probability of 88%, if he that place did not look, then there was no cursor either.

84% of the regions of the mouse cursor visited, 84% of them were by mouse eye gaze. Furthermore, 88% of them didn’t visit, or 88% of the eyes.

But this does not mean that the cursor was everywhere the visitor looked! Those. the heat map of mouse movements shows some (unknown how large or small) part of what the user supposedly saw. The second conclusion is that it is impossible to estimate the temporal parameters of perception of information, including the sequence of this perception, from the movement of the mouse.

Try to follow your interest while visiting the sites and follow what exactly you see and how you move the mouse.

Second: this study was conducted in 2000, when sites were not as common as they are now, and users are less accustomed to computers. And my observations (not yet documented as a scientific article due to insufficient statistics) show that the correlation between the gaze and the mouse decreases with increasing user experience.

At least during our research, in 6 cases out of 10 experienced internet users do not move the mouse at all until they find with their eyes what they want to click or check for hover (the cursor remains almost in one place and the mouse wheel is used to scroll the page ); among inexperienced users, this behavior is observed on average in 3 cases out of 10. Cases of more or less accurate following the cursor behind the sight (coincidence of the cursor position and the trajectory of the sight at least once a second or one and a half) are observed much less frequently, approximately 1 out of 30. Also, approximately every tenth user moves the mouse absolutely not where his gaze is located (presumably, the habit remaining from old times to prevent the screensaver from starting).

To some extent, this observation of mine coincides with the fact that in later studies (not so scientific, and using a smaller number of respondents) “percentages of correlation” were lower: 69% in the 2005 study , 42% in the 2007 Google study ( page 31), and 32% in the Google 2008 study , where mouse movements were more or less similar to eye movement in 56 cases out of 175.

Conclusion: a definite correlation exists between the movement of the cursor and the look, but how important it is and in what cases is applicable is not entirely clear.

Conscious and unconscious

The reason for the discrepancy described above and the main difference between eytracking from other research methods is that it captures unconscious reactions, and mouse movements and other actions are conscious. If you simplify a little, then with the help of light tracking you can track (and often just see) the cause of actions, and with traditional methods you can see the result and, analyzing it, try to get to the bottom of the cause.

By the way, thanks to the fixation of unconscious reactions, eytracking can reduce the required number of respondents in the focus group. If for traditional methods the minimum number is 8-10 respondents, for light tracking it is 5 respondents for qualitative (as opposed to quantitative) analysis (optimally 10-15).

Here it will be appropriate to additionally give a link to a good article by Jacob Nielsen " Five Users - Everything You Need to Test "

Number of respondents

Of course, a huge positive factor web visitor is a large number of visitors to your site, which is collected statistics. Moreover, these are real visitors, and not in any way selected focus group. Such data are of great value, allowing you to assess the flow of visitors through your site and their activity on its pages.

Objectives of the respondents

The above described plus of the web-visitor - a large number of real visitors to the site - paradoxically turns into his own minus: you don’t know why all these people came to the site and you don’t always know who they are. That is, in order to evaluate, for example, the convenience of making a purchase in a store, you need to somehow separate the visitors who came to buy something (including those who could not do it) from those who came, say, just See what's new has appeared or find out the characteristics of the goods.

When testing in focus groups, you know which people are doing the task, what kind of task they are performing and have the opportunity during the experiment or after it to conduct a survey and ask them to clarify some of their actions. This is very useful precisely in terms of identifying and eliminating various usability errors.

You can make this analogy. A web visitor is information about the movement of cars in the city. Most different cars, with different drivers: someone just rides, someone goes to the store, someone to the country, someone to work, and someone broke. This information is very useful from the point of view of urban economy: you can see where traffic jams arise and try to eliminate them.

Aytreking in this analogy is the “launching” of several “typical” drivers with a proposal to get from point A to point B and thoroughly fixing everything that happens. These data make it possible to identify the maximum inconvenience that prevent drivers from reaching the cherished point B and, accordingly, make this route the most convenient and understandable.

Price

High cost is traditionally the main drawback of eytrecking — expensive equipment, highly professional staff, the need to recruit and pay groups of respondents — all this requires money. However, the price of research is not at all transcendental - most studies cost about 20 thousand rubles, and simple ones start at 6000. On our website you can independently estimate the cost of research on a calculator and see what it adds up to and what you can save on.

Materials studied

In terms of what can be explored using these methods, eye-tracking wins. If mouse tracking allows you to explore only sites and, with certain restrictions, program interfaces, eye-tracking, in addition, is used to study design layouts and prototypes, printing, commercials and other materials that may not require any action from the user.

And one of the most effective methods of using eytreking is just testing mockups and prototypes - you get the opportunity to identify errors at the earliest stages, when the cost of fixing them is minimal.

Conclusion

Both mouse tracking and eye-tracking are quite handy and useful tools, and it’s pretty silly to oppose them to each other. It is unlikely that you will oppose the hammer with a screwdriver or a microwave to a coffee maker. You just need to understand what you want to achieve and what parameters to measure.