Eye Tracking: How It Works and How It Relates to Usability

Eye tracking enables usability practitioners and researchers to capture and analyze people’s eye movements in terms of fixations, saccades, and scanpaths. Already popular in other research fields—such as human-computer interaction, cognitive psychology, and marketing—eye tracking is just beginning to surface as a method for studying human behavior within technical communication. This article introduces technical communicators to the mechanics of eye tracking and to usability-related research in the areas of reading and scanning, and searching. It concludes with suggested areas for future eye-tracking research.