Window to the Soul: Tracking Eyes to Inform the Design of Visualizations

A picture is worth a thousand words. To take advantage of powerful human vision, we generate visualizations for people to view and to understand the underlying data. However, these a thousand words do not necessarily tell the truth about the data. A good visualization can make the data understanding process effective, while a bad visualization may hinder the process, even convey misleading information. To produce effective visualizations, it is important for us to have a good understanding of how people actually perceive and process the visual information. People view visualizations using their eyes, and tracking their eye movements can be a useful method for this purpose. In this talk, I will present a series eye tracking studies on how people read graphs. These studies demonstrate that: 1) eye tracking is an effective method for gaining insights into how people read graphs, and 2) how obtained insights from eye tracking can be used to inform the design of visualizations.