Eye-tracking in Practice : The Path to Evaluating a New Interface for Personal Desktop Search

Analysis of eye movement data provides a valuable methodology to evaluate and inform user interface design. However, there are a number hurdles that must be overcome on the path to successfully gaining meaningful eye movement data. We describe how we used a commercially available eye tracking system to evaluate a new interface for personal desktop search called Phlat. A small eye-tracking user study was conducted, which presented a number of challenges in order for participants to search data situated on their own remote desktop machine while in the eye-tracking laboratory. The convergence between the results of this eye-tracking study and a larger analysis of application logs points to at least one area were Phlat’s user interface might be improved.