Przeglądając różne blogi branżowe natrafiam od kilku miesięcy na temat webcam eye trackingu. Koncepcja ta  opierająca się na wykorzystaniu zwykłych, istniejących w laptopach kamerek (webcam) do badań eyetrackingowych, na początku 2012 roku brzmi lekko absurdalnie. Ale być może za kilka lat, wraz z rozwojem technologii i spadkiem cen, może się rozwinie?

Aga Bojko, autorka mającej się ukazać w tym roku nakładem wydawnictwa Rosenfeld Media książki Eye Tracking the  User Experience: A practical guide , popełniła bardzo interesujący wpis The Truth About Webcam Eye Tracking, w którym opisuje jak obecnie wygląda przeprowadzenie takiego badania i jakie są ich aktualne ograniczenia. Najważniejsze wnioski to:

• What decreases the accuracy of webcam eye tracking even further is when participants move their heads, and the longer the session, the more likely this will happen. Therefore, webcam eye tracking sessions have to be very short – typically less than 5 minutes, but ideally less than a minute. Studies conducted with real eye trackers, on the other hand, can last a lot longer with little impact on accuracy.
• Currently, webcam eye tracking can handle only single static pages. All four studies I have participated in and a few I read about were one-page studies. Without allowing participants to click on anything and go to another page, the applicability of webcam eye tracking is limited. This constraint also lowers the external validity of the studies.
• The rate at which the gaze location is sampled is much lower for webcams than real eye trackers. The typical frame rate of a remote (i.e., non-wearable) eye tracker is between 60 and 500 Hz (i.e., images per second). The webcam frame rate is somewhere between 5 and 30 Hz. The low frame rate makes analyzing fixations and saccades impossible. The analysis is limited to looking at rough gaze points.
• Due to imperfect lighting conditions, poor webcams, on-screen distractions, participants’ head movement, and overall lower tracking robustness, out of every 10 people who participate in a study, only 3 – 7 will provide sufficiently useful data. While this may not be a problem in and of itself because of very low oversampling costs, what makes me uncomfortable is not knowing how the determination to exclude data from the analysis is made. Data cleansing is important in any study but it is absolutely critical in webcam eye tracking. Exclusion criteria should be made explicit for webcam eye tracking to gain trust among researchers.

Źródło: The Truth About Webcam Eye Tracking, Aga Bojko, Rosenfeld Media Eye Tracking blog

In 14 bakeries we tested the effect of different messages associated with a fundraising solicitation. An opaque moneybox was placed near the cash register with a message explaining on a first line that the solicitation was for a humanitarian project for African children conducted by students. On the second line the words “DONATING = LOVING” (loving condition), “DONATING = HELPING” (helping condition), or no inscription (control) appeared. The second line was changed each day and for each bakery according to a random distribution. Results showed that more donations (almost two times more) were made in the loving condition compared to the two others, whereas there was no difference between the helping and the control conditions.

Źródło: The effect of the word ‘‘love’’ on compliance to a request for humanitarian aid: An evaluation in a field setting, Nicolas Gueguen and Lubomir Lamy, SOCIAL INFLUENCE 2011, 6 (4), 249–258, Psycology Press

We embarked on a little experiment. We asked a ton of people to send us their settings file for Microsoft Word. At the time, MS Word stored all the settings in a file named something like config.ini, so we asked people to locate that file on their hard disk and email it to us. Several hundred folks did just that.

We then wrote a program to analyze the files, counting up how many people had changed the 150+ settings in the applications and which settings they had changed.

What we found was really interesting. Less than 5% of the users we surveyed had changed any settings at all. More than 95% had kept the settings in the exact configuration that the program installed in.

Źródło: Do users change their settings?, Jared Spool, UIE Brain Sparks.

Ran Kivetz, Oleg Urminsky i  Yuhuang Zheng opisali w 2006 roku badanie, którego celem było zbadanie skuteczności “iluzji postępu” (illusion of progress). W ramach eksperymentu, 108 klientom kawiarni wręczono karty lojalnościowe, które umożliwiały otrzymanie darmowej kawy/wypieku po zebraniu 10 pieczątek. Badani otrzymali dwa typy kart: z 10 polami do wypełnienia oraz z 12 polami, gdzie dwa pierwsze pola zostały już wypełnione. Klienci, którzy otrzymali kupony z 10 polami, zbierali średnio pieczątki  po  16 dniach, a ci którzy dostali 12 polowe kupony – średnio po 13 dniach, czyli zdecydowanie szybciej.

Method. The participants were 108 customers of the café we described previously. They were randomly assigned to either a control condition or an experimental (illusionary goal progress) condition. Specifically, research assistants posing as café employees randomly offered customers either a 10-stamp or a 12-stamp coffee card (…). The 10-stamp and the 12-stamp cards indicated that members were required to accumulate 10 and 12 coffee purchases, respectively, to earn one free coffee. However, customers assigned to the 12-stamp experimental condition received two preexisting bonus stamps, described as an offer to anyone who opted to join the program. Thus, although the two groups faced identical effort requirements when joining the program (i.e., r – nt = accumulating 10 coffee purchases), the experimental group started with a lower proportion of original distance remaining to the goal than did the control group (i.e., dt+2 = .83 and dt = 1.0, respectively). All other aspects of the program were held constant across the two conditions and were identical to those we described previously for the café RP.

Results. Consistent with H2, the results indicate that illusionary goal progress led to faster completion of the reward requirement. On average, customers in the control condition completed the ten required purchases (for the 10-stamp card) in 15.6 days. In contrast, customers in the experimental (illusionary goal progress) condition completed the ten required purchases (for the corresponding 12-stamp card) in only 12.7 days, nearly three days or 20% faster (t = 2.0, p < .05; medians = 15 versus 10 days; Z = 2.1, p < .05 [Mann–Whitney U test]).

Źródło: The Goal-Gradient Hypothesis Resurrected: Purchase Acceleration, Illusionary Goal Progress, and Customer Retention, Ran Kivetz, Oleg Urminsky,  Yuhuang Zheng  Journal of Marketing Research, Vol. XLIII (February 2006), 39–58, American Marketing Association

W sierpniowym numerze Core77, Don Norman, autor m.in. kultowego Design of Everyday Things, współzałożyciel Norman Nielsen Group opublikował esej, który ma szansę stać się w przyszłości (niestety) jednym z najbardziej popularnych uzsadanień/wymówek do niewykonywania badań przed etapem projektowania:

Here are five very different arguments to support the practical reality of starting by designing, not through design research. First, the existence of good design that was not preceded by research. Second, the argument that experienced designers already have acquired the knowledge that would come from research. Third, the research effort of a company ought to be continually ongoing, so that results are available instantly. Fourth, and most controversial, research might inhibit creativity. And fifth, when the product is launched and the team assembled, it is already too late.
(…)
When I was a professor of cognitive science, I learned that reading and becoming expert at the existing research literature created a delicate tradeoff. Too much knowledge could be harmful. The point of my students’ PhD dissertations (and of all my own research) is to make a significant advance in the understanding of a topic. Read too much of the existing literature about what previous researchers have thought and done and you will follow in their footsteps. This means that you will also encounter the same dead ends. Without knowing the literature, you can be creative and often discover valuable new insights and directions.

Źródło: Act First, Do the Research Later, Don Norman, Core77