Physiological measures provide a valuable source of insight for understanding user experience and behavior. For example, tracking users’ eye movements allows us to understand whether an application is able to successfully communicate key information to users. My research focuses on informing the design and development of applications by incorporating users’ objective, subjective and physiological measures of experience.

The picture on the top left shows my colleague, Marisa Siegel, working with the eye tracker, which is built in into the monitor. The eye tracker reflects invisible infrared light onto Marisa’s eye and records the reflection pattern with its sensor system. This allows the eye tracker to determine Marisa’s gaze. The gaze data then can be visualized with heat maps (picture on the bottom left), which not only show the location of the gaze but also its intensity. In heat maps, red indicates the most fixations with yellow and green representing decreased gaze intensity. Areas with no color were not viewed.