Aside from using eye tracking to assess UI design (identifying low saliency features of a system, making key information easy and intuitive to navigate to, etc), it's been fun to consider eye tracking as a source of insight for more playful layouts (ie- cinematics and games).
In my previous post, I mentioned Dave Pimentel's notes on drawing for storyboarding.
I like to put Dave's storyboarding sketches in front of our eye tracking test participants to see how well his layouts/ composition principles can guide a users' gaze.
We see a great deal of attention given to:
- Faces
- Where those faces are looking
- Motion! (most of the time these are hands or arms)
- Flashing lights!! (or flickering, or dimming... or whatever, basically any dynamic [changing] lighting can be used to direct attention)
- The obvious: high contrast areas (colors, values, lighting, repeated patterns/ breaks in repeated patterns (the former establishes a unity, the latter provides contrast with that unity))
- The center of the screen! (my gosh, do they love the center of the screen)
- If surround sound/ stereo is employed, you can direct a user (or often times a gamer using a mouse to control their gaze)'s gaze off screen.
- If surround sound/ stereo is employed, you can direct a user (or often times a gamer using a mouse to control their gaze)'s gaze off screen.
furthermore (when presented groups of faces):
- Attractive faces (see the kennedy debate, foxnews,com, or huffpost.com. Then tell me where your eyes go)
- Threatening faces (angry, mean, bald [i'm bald, and i catch gazes at the supermarket after i've recently shaved my head)
The following example of eye tracking for entertainment comes from a researcher in London.
*A special note on eye-tracking- You can glean solid statistics on areas of interest, times to response, gaze patterns, and fixation durations. However, eye tracking data in a research setting is only as valuable as the price you pay for the equipment, and UI eye-tracking data collection and statistics are often more work than they're worth. That said, I do recommend it for practitioners (anyone using it in a non academic environment) who have an extra buck to spend- if only for the insight gained from watching a heat map/ gaze indicating overlay [like the one above].
