Screen sharing tests - best practices
To get the most insights while testing your website, the best you can do is to combine two of these types - mockup and live websites. (If you own the study and can modify it, you can also run Embedded website tests).
Screen recording testing enables you to see the user's path, his/her focus points, displayed ads, and so on. As a result, you'll gain a recording for each participant (of his/her gaze and mouse) and a heatmap per participant. Note: there is no aggregated data for all participants due to technical limitations - each participant has a different path, screen resolution, display time per page, sees different ads, etc.). This kind of study can be done for a smaller number of participants, as it's a qualitative study. This is why there should be a specific command/message for participants, for example:
- browse this website freely for a minute
- find your favorite snack on the following store's website
- find information about pricing on the following page
This study should be complemented by another type - website mockup (screenshot) test. You can quantitatively study the key pages to get aggregated data for all participants (recordings, heatmaps, and a CSV file). This will allow you to measure the attention for certain AOIs: average time to notice (or time to the first fixation), ratio (how many people noticed the area), and so on. We recommend for this type of study hiring from 50 to 200 participants.
Both types can be (or even should be) followed up with some additional questions, which can be easily done in any survey or interview. RealEye allows integration with external tools and has its own survey module.
Recommended internet connection speed for live website testing is 20 Mbps | 5 Mbps, minimum 5 Mbps | 1 Mbps.
NOTE: Screen recording tests can't be conducted on smartphones, but you can use a website mockup study instead.
To avoid closing the test by participants without saving results, you may want to end the eye-tracking test by the tested website.