Towards facilitating user skill acquisition: identifying untrained visualization users through eye tracking

A key challenge for information visualization designers lies in developing systems that best support users in terms of their individual abilities, needs, and preferences. However, most visualizations require users to first gather a certain set of skills before they can efficiently process the displayed information. This paper presents a first step towards designing visualizations that provide personalized support in order to ease the so-called 'learning curve' during a user's skill acquisition phase. We present prediction models, trained on users' gaze data, that can identify if users are still in the skill acquisition phase or if they have gained the necessary abilities. The paper first reveals that users exhibit the learning curve even during the usage of simple information visualizations, and then shows that we can generate reasonably accurate predictions about a user's skill acquisition using solely their eye gaze behavior.