

Beyond Heatmaps: Visualizing Eye Tracking Data - bkrausz
http://www.gazehawk.com/blog/beyond-heatmaps-visualizing-eye-tracking-data/

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ethank
If you are interested in eye tracking and HCI it's worth reading up on
saccades (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saccade>) and eye tracking
(<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eye_tracking>)

I didn't do much HCI but worked with some HCI labs that did saccade analysis
with photography and photo manipulation. Fascinating stuff.

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aresant
I think what's missing in the formatting is the dimension of "time" - I noted
this on the article comments as well.

I'd love to see an animation that reflects the visual attention of multi-user
studies across time span.

Throw out the noise, give an "average" of how and when users see each page
element and then you're solving not only for the "where" but also the "when".

That's a crucial piece of data in trying to solve for user abandons, etc.

~~~
lbarrow
(GazeHawk intern here.) That's definitely a good approach if you presuppose
the existence/obviousness of distinct page elements, which is a whole beast in
and of itself.

Right now we allow our customers to define "Areas of Interest" in our
reporting system, and we immediately display statistics like average user time
on area, average rank of area (ie how many other areas, on average, did users
look at first) and so forth. However, it's unclear to me how to represent
these numbers in a visually intuitive way in the case where there are 50
distinct areas.

One possibility we're exploring is coloring different areas with different
intensities based on some index composed of these features. However, it's not
clear what the right formula for this index is, or if it's the same in all
situations.

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bengl3rt
Am I the only one who looked at this title and thought they were talking about
hurricanes? Seemed topical...

