Visual analysis of eye tracking data

Abstract

Eye tracking has become a valuable approach to evaluate visualization techniques in a user centered design process. Apart from just relying on task accuracies and completion times, eye movements can additionally be recorded to later study visual task solution strategies and the cognitive workload of study participants. During an eye tracking experiment many data sets are recorded. Standard techniques to analyze this eye tracking data are heat map and scan path visualizations. However, it still requires a high effort to analyze scan path trajectory data to find common task solution strategies among the study participants. In this chapter we discuss three existing methodologies for analyzing the vast amount of eye tracking data from a visualization and visual analytics perspective. These three approaches are a classical static visualization, visual analytics techniques and finally a software prototype, which helps the user to manage, view and analyze the recorded data in a simple interactive way.