Web Usability Testing With Concurrent fNIRS and Eye Tracking

Abstract The wealth management industry has been one of the prime beneficiaries of the digitization wave, with incessantly growing investment from fintech companies to develop new online platforms. The current methods of evaluating the effectiveness, usability, and ease of use of these web platforms are rudimentary and subjective, as they rely largely on traditional survey measures and may fail to uncover critical usability issues with a platform. When companies launch such web platforms, early adopter users are usually faced with an array of issues, ranging from ineffective navigation to poor layout, which may cause consumers to lose trust and eventually switch to other brands and services. There has been a long-standing need to develop more effective methods to assess web platforms. We propose and empirically validate a multimodal approach that combines traditional methods (survey and performance measures) with physiological (eye-tracking and neuroimaging) measures to enable more holistic and rigorous testing of web platforms. This approach overcomes the limitations of traditional methods and enables a more comprehensive usability assessment.