Revising Poor Man's Eye Tracker For Crowd-Sourced Studies

Abstract

Eye-tracking is a frequently used tool in conducting user studies. It is a method to trace which areas were in a test person's gaze, what they might have perceived and where certain points of attention might be located. However, eye tracking requires test persons to visit the lab, which limits the scope of user studies. Therefore, we developed a tool to track the test person's gaze while conducting tasks in a web browser. In the browser we can only track the mouse pointer, which is known as poor man's eye tracker. However, the mouse pointer does not necessarily reveal on which area of the web page the user is focusing and therefore it does not allow to conclude the attention of the test person. We extended the mouse tracking by applying a fog to the web page. Only an area around the mouse pointer is without fog. Consequently, the mouse pointer must follow the gaze. In addition, we developed visualisation tools to analyze the focus of the user, i.e. determine the areas where the user's eye had enough time to perceive the visible area. Based on the focus data, studies can conduct further analysis to infer the user's attention or the strategy used to solve the task. Since our tool is entirely web-based, it can be used for large-scale crowd-sourced studies.