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Human-centred approaches have appeared in product development and management processes more and more, increasing product success. As an implementation of human-centredness, usability testing is one of the methods involving the users into the development process, and I investigated the complementarity of it with eye-tracking in the field of physical (tangible) products.
A review of the literature shows that eye-tracking is nowadays a widely used tool in certain fields, such as cognitive and marketing research and software testing. Still, it has not yet widely applied to the testing of physical products.
In my doctoral research, I was mainly interested in how mobile eye-tracking can provide new information for testing physical products compared to other usability tests and which elements of the broad methodological toolkit of eye-tracking (eye-tracking videos, heat maps, video coding) should be used for this purpose and how. I aim to develop methodological recommendations for eye-tracking in new and unusual fields of application.
In order to achieve this, I have conducted five studies that build on, complement or support each other: (1) Testing a kitchen machine - usability testing of a medium-sized product. (2) Testing two tents - comparative usability testing of larger-sized products using heat map analysis. (3) Testing a set of foldable pots - developing methodological details. (4) Testing two industrial workstations - supplementing the methodology with video coding. (5) Testing a camper van - considering user differences in formative testing.
The results show that incorporating eye-tracking into product development processes of physical products provide additional information compared to simpler usability testing. As well as being applicable at different stages of the development process of physical products, multiple visualisation techniques, video coding, and multiple quantification options can usefully complement the essentially qualitative testing, with the benefits of both small and large participant numbers. Based on my experiences with these studies, I will provide methodological suggestions to help conduct similar studies with physical products.