What is the importance of controlling variables, and what does that mean for designing testing materials?
By controlling variables, researchers can more effectively pinpoint the causes of differing behavior. In Eyetrack III, specific design changes on the news websites were controlled to pinpoint how viewing behavior differed across different design elements. For example, homepage No. 1 and homepage No. 6 contain the same content, but homepage No. 6 includes blurbs below the headlines. Because everything else on the pages is the same, we believe that any differences in the data between the two pages may be caused by the thing that is different — the presence or absence of the blurbs. When there are multiple variables that are different across two or more versions that are being compared, it becomes more difficult to establish how each of the variables contributes to the difference. This challenge is particularly difficult when the number of test participants is small. By limiting the differences to just one variable, we can be more assured of the cause of the difference.
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