Analysis of eye tracking data obtained by customers' product evaluations

Within the mechanical engineering discipline, product representational studies have been used to inform engineers on the suitability of their product designs for prospective customers. Mainly based in customers' oral responses, engineers would modify the product design accordingly. The incorporation of eye tracking data, in addition to the oral responses, in these product representational studies is a recent addition. This case study performs data analysis of a product representational study conducted by Reid, MacDonald and Du (2012), which considers the impact of 2D and 3D product representation on customer judgments with associated eye gaze patterns. The aim of this thesis is to act as a set of guidelines for analyzing other eye tracking studies that deal with product evaluations by discussing some of the possible analysis techniques to use the eye tracking data to obtain interesting facts and patterns. The thesis presents these five guideline characteristics: (1) question-based analysis, (2) question and category dependencies, (3) product and category dependencies, (4) gender impact and (5) experiment repeatability situations. In addition, a brief comparison of the 2D and 3D product representation experiments is described for each guideline characteristic.