Alternatives to Eye Tracking for Predicting Stimulus-Driven Attentional Selection Within Interfaces

Abstract

The visual properties of a design contribute to the formation of regions with differing amounts of uniqueness, or salience, producing an initial stimulus-driven attentional bias. The colocation of salient regions and critical information should be maximized as this increases the interface's usability by decreasing search times. The determination of salient locations, however, is often difficult. In web page design, eye tracking has traditionally been used to measure where users attend, therefore indicating the salient regions. But, eye tracking as a descriptive technique has many known costs. We propose two alternative methods to eye tracking that can be used to predict which regions of a web page will draw users' stimulus-driven attention: interest point recording and saliency model predictions. Through an empirical investigation we show that the predictions of both methods correlate with the locations fixated by a separate group of participants, and thus these methods are effective alternatives to eye tracking during formative design testing.

Notes

Acknowledgments. We thank Mary Still for providing valuable feedback on earlier drafts of this article.

HCI Editorial Record. First manuscript received August 11, 2010. Revisions received January 10, 2012 and June 27, 2012. Accepted by Clayton Lewis. Final manuscript received August 22, 2012. — Editor