There has been an explosion of Tweets about eye tracking! Google recently captured the hearts and minds of SEO experts and designers with a blog post about research they did with a Tobii eye tracker on the user interface for Universal Search.

They wanted to test the affect incorporating thumbnail images into the search results interface and ran a series of eye-tracking studies that compared how users scan the pages with and without thumbnail images. The studies showed that the thumbnails did not strongly affect the order of scanning the results and seemed to make it easier for the participants to find the results they wanted or skip over the ones they didn’t.

In the twitter stream last night I noticed some people asking what it would be like to eye track Twitter, so here it is!

I eye tracked Kylie, a novice Twitter user, and she had all sorts of trouble working out how to find people to follow!

Remember how hard it was to find people to follow on twitter when you started?

This is a video of that experience. It takes a bit of time to load, but you can click on it to go to YouTube.

Kylie clicked on ‘Find People’ and wanted to search on a real name, but she couldn’t.

Later on she wanted to see a summary of the people on someone’s the follower list. This is there but hidden in pop ups (alt text). So the followers’ details are impossible to see unless she scrolled over them!

You know I never knew that ‘alt’ text was there either until I was watching the replay!! Why not just put it on the screen next to the person’s photo?

Stay tuned more to come!