Timeline visualization of workspace gazes

Premise: to have an idea of the experiment that I am currently analyzing, refer to this technical report.

Following my previous work on visualizing eye movements on a shared map during collaborative work at distance, I came out with another visualization that shows how gazes alternate across the different components of the interface. I divided the workspace in three functional areas: (1) the shared map, (2) the composition pane of the chat window; (3) the history pane of the chat window. Then I aggregated the gaze movements in sequences of two or more fixations (100ms or more in the same area) in the same functional areas.

A sequence of fixations in the map window was then colored in orange on the timeline below. A sequence of two or more fixations in the composition panel was colored in blue and finally a sequence of two or more fixations in the history pane was colored in red. As in the ShoutSpace condition (e.g., ss) there was no difference between the history and the composition pane (these two function share the same space in the interface), I used an alternative color: yellow. Little traits mark the posting of utterances with the relative coding information.

At macro level it is possible to see that in the MSN condition participants alternate interface components with a higher frequency than in the other two conditions. This is due to the fact that they need to rely on text to express positions in space and analyze their partner’s intention, while in the ss or the cc condition, participants work mostly inside the map space, with an immediacy of references and referent information. This has implications for the task performances.