The opportunity shows up when several key major players in the eye tracker industry have been purchased by Google, Facebook, and Apple and became their internal research team with no longer sales nor support for the market users. The huge development strength differences of the remaining players gradually result in a monopoly from a dominant player in the market. The mobile eye-tracking analysis product the dominant player is providing can't feed the diverse needs of the clients on the market. Here my team started to do deep market research on the potential markets that we could target and the infiltrating strategy we could use.

It is acknowledged that in different areas/countries the market can be unique and independent. The key to publishing a successful product is depending on whether the provider/sales can offer a localized service/product to meet the native needs. Even for the eye-tracking system whose functions were supposed to have has been shaped by academic researchers in the last century, the hidden added value must be met to open the market channel. In the light of manpower and time cost, I did researches on criteria for admitting competitors into the market in different countries/areas and ranked the most valuable target market and user group for our product.

By interviewing the targeted clients and analyzing their core needs, the two major scenarios have been summarized for generating system requirements and delivering the system parameters for the hardware and software. For example, because participants might be wearing this mobile eye-tracking system to walk around, the appearance of the eyeglass frame together with the accessory should be normal. The weight and the way of wearing it shouldn't cause discomfort or alienation of the participants in the testing environment. For the researchers, simple and fast data analysis tools should be provided in the analyzing software to make the whole research experience easy and pleasant.

Based on the market research and the developing capacity of my team, aiming to be a strong competitor in the targeted market, I have formulated the requirements for the mobile eye-tracking system and categorized those into three categories which should be developed by professionals from three different fields. 

Eye tracker hardware: this part of the design requires optic system engineers to work together with the algorithm programmers.

Recording software: the designer and engineer should pay attention to system latency and communication protocols when dealing with this part.

Analyzing software: user experience designer and interface designer come in to improve the usability of the software.

Due to the range of this project, it is important to get everyone on board with what the team is aiming for and at the same time why the team is designing in this way. Not only creativities should play in this cooperation, but also the limitations on resources and technologies should be brought to the table for all the team members to avoid over-design. Therefore, I held several meetings to deliver a case study to the whole team by using modified scenario description swimlanes in the following section to generate an overall understanding of the work of different teams and the product with user scenarios.

For a long time, scenario description swim-lanes have been used as an important tool to find out how to define and design product modules based on their distributed value while being used during the business operational process. 

For mobile eye-tracking analysis, the system should be mostly determined by scientific research users’ needs and their purposes. In order to design a highly user-friendly eye-tracking system, I have taken one eye-tracking analysis case study as an explanation to my development team and examined the discoveries of the system demands from this case study under scrutiny regarding the relationship between functions and usabilities in the marketing field where mobile eye-tracking study are very commonly used.

This modified scenario description of swim lanes is organized in a set of streamlined actions of how an eye-tracking test is performed. Its analysis is composed by mainly five parts:

•    storyboardI from participant’s view;

•    storyboardII from researcher’s view;

•    corresponding business value;

•    corresponding product module;

•    corresponding system responses;

Besides a whole research circle which involves eye-tracking research method and the collaboration of multiple roles, it also contains very valuable information collected from customer interviews with researchers from universities and eye-movement analysis services providers, which was very helpful for my product group to define product packages, separate core demands, organize development tasks.

It very often happens in a big team that each information segmentation is limited to the professionals from different departments. For example, the algorithm developers are not aware of the purposes and the user scenarios of the product. Vice versa, the product managers and the marketing team are not familiar with the logic and reasons behind some dedicated design of some key features. This leads to inefficient communication inside my team. 

By providing this case study to the whole team, each member has more knowledge of how this system is working with the customers. Thus they could contribute more ideas when a problem occurs from different perspectives but still talk on the same page.