Unconscious Frustration: Dynamically Assessing User Experience using Eye and Mouse Tracking

Abstract

Eye-tracking has become easier to deploy in user experience (UX) studies to get a sense of where users attend to during interactions. Additionally, mouse tracking grants insights into the cognition driving the user's behaviours and end goals, as can measuring the coordination between the eye and mouse-cursor. We created a menu navigation task based on a popular video game to assess two populations: a local cohort, and a remote cohort. We used two different eye trackers (monitor-mounted hardware, and a webcam-based algorithm; local used both simultaneously, remote used webcam only) with concurrent mouse tracking to detect friction in the UX. We found that both eye trackers had similar performance and revealed a previously undetected friction point. We argue this friction point was only detected because of the use of quantified, coordinated unconscious behaviours (eye and hand movements). The methods demonstrated are easily integrated into current UX studies with minimal cost.