Using Eye-Tracking to Demonstrate Children’s Attention to Detail When Evaluating Low-Fidelity Prototypes

This study used eye-tracking glasses to better understand how children explore low-fidelity prototypes in the context of user experience studies and to explore the potential of eye tracking in this context. The main research question that was being explored was whether the aesthetic refinement, either wireframe or high-resolution images, would affect children’s self-report and if so, or if not, what could be learned from knowing where children looked when exploring the prototypes. The results showed that the aesthetic refinement had little influence over the children’s overall ratings of the game. The eye-tracking data demonstrated that there were no differences in the time spent viewing the prototypes and most of the children focused on both the visuals and text on all the pages. However, there were a higher number of fixations recorded in the wireframe prototype compared to the photo-realistic version. This paper contributes to the design of prototypes through an understanding of how children interact with prototypes, demonstrating the importance of the text along with the visuals when evaluating game concepts with children. Further research is required to understand the differences and whether similar results are replicated with different games.