Analyzing User Interactions with music information retrieval system: An eye tracking approach

Abstract

There has been little research considering eye movement as a measure when assessing user interactions with music information retrieval (MIR) systems, whereas many studies have adopted conventional user-centered measures such as user effectiveness and user perception. To bridge this research gap, this study investigates users' eye movement patterns and measures with two music retrieval tasks and two interface presentation modes. A user experiment was conducted with 16 participants whose eye movement and mouse click behaviors were recorded through professional eye trackers. Through analyzing visual patterns of eye gazes and movements as well as various metrics in prominent Areas of Interest (AOI), it is found that users’ eye movement behaviors were related to task type. Besides, the results also disclosed that some eye movement metrics were related to both user effectiveness and user perception, and influenced by user characteristics. It is also found that some eye movement and user effectiveness metrics can be used to predict user perception. This study allows researchers to gain a deeper insight into user interactions with MIR systems from the perspective of eye movement measure.