Capturing Thoughts, Capturing Minds? From Think Aloud to Participatory Analysis

Think Aloud is cost effective, promises access to the user's mind and is the applied usability technique. But 'keep talking' is difficult, besides, the multimodal interface is visual not verbal. Eye-tracking seems to get around the verbalisation problem. It captures the visual focus of attention. However, it is expensive, obtrusive and produces huge amount of data. Besides, eye-tracking do not give access to user's mind. Capturing interface/cursor tracking may be cost effective. It is easy to install, data collection is automatic and unobtrusive and replaying the captured recording to the user and probing about her actions and thoughts open for participatory analysis. Keywords usability test, cost effective, unobtrusive, TA, eye and cursor tracking, user experience, participatory analysis