Core visualisations

Gaze Plot / Gaze Replay

Shot of a web site with a gaze plot overlaidA gaze plot is created from the data accumulated over an entire recording. It shows the order in which a single participant looked at different sections of a stimulus.

The size of the points most often show the relative time of a fixation; numbers are often included to illustrate the viewing order.

Shot of a man's bare torso with his arm held cross his chest. He has a metal spoon instead of a hand. A gaze plot is overlaid showing attention on the spoon.

A gaze plot can be animated retaining the measures detailed above.

gaze replay overlaid on top of a shot of a television screen showing a man's rear endWe can also produce a gaze replay to represent the viewing areas of a video or TV commercial, or to identify the strength of product placement.

Attention is measured in terms of fixation count, gaze time, and fixation duration.

 

Heat maps

Bottle of beer with an overlaid heatmapA heat-map is the aggregation of many individuals’ viewing experience. The hotter the colour, the more ‘attention’ was given, collectively, to an area. Attention may be in terms of fixation count (as in this heat-map) or subject percentage.

Heat-maps can illustrate different measures however. The examples below show the same image seen by the same participants for the same length of time. As you can see, the three images are a bit different.

scale showing colour correlation to strength of attention given

three examples of heat maps on a single screen

  • The first shows ‘fixation count’, i.e. how many fixations occurred in each area of the shown stimuli.
  • The second shows ‘absolute duration’, i.e. for how long all users combined looked at a specific area.
  • The last shows ‘relative duration’, i.e. for how long in relation to the total page viewing time the participants looked at a specific area.

The illustrated measures dictate which kind of heat-map we use.