An intuitive visualization for rapid data analysis: using the DNA metaphor for eye movement patterns

Eye tracking has become a valuable approach in user-centered studies, because it adds an additional source of information that can be recorded for later analysis, instead of just relying on the task completion and the time to completion. Without proper analysis of eye tracking data, important information can remain untold. In this paper, we present an intuitive visualization for rapid data analysis of eye movement patterns. Compared to heat maps or scan path visualizations, AOI-DNAs are easy to implement and take less effort to detect eye movement patterns. Therefore, they are viable for visual data mining and offer capabilities for user interactions for extended visual analytics. In conclusion, we implemented the first prototype to use AOI-DNAs and the first version of a fuzzy search to highlight eye movement patterns. We applied the proposed visualizations in a preliminary analysis to a well-known dataset to illustrate the practical usefulness as a case study in this paper.