UX Glossary · E
Eye tracking
Also: Gaze tracking
Measuring where people look and for how long, usually visualised as heat maps or gaze paths.
Eye tracking records where a participant’s gaze lands, in what order, and for how long. Output is typically a heat map of accumulated attention or a scan path showing sequence.
What it is genuinely good for
Eye tracking answers whether something was seen. That is a narrow question, and it is one no other method answers reliably, because people cannot report what they failed to notice.
The best-known finding is Nielsen Norman Group’s F-shaped reading pattern, published in 2006: on text-heavy pages people tend to read the first lines more fully, then scan down the left side, forming an F. It is a pattern, not a law, and it appears most strongly when the page gives no better structure to follow.
What it does not answer
Looking is not understanding. A heat map showing attention on a button does not show that the label made sense, and a cold area might mean invisible or might mean irrelevant and correctly ignored.
Cost and calibration also limit it. Webcam-based tools have widened access but are considerably less precise than dedicated hardware.
In practice
It is most useful for a specific question: is this element being seen at all. For broader questions, a moderated usability test with think-aloud produces more actionable findings per hour.