Exploring product communication between the designer and the user through eye-tracking technology

The purpose of this study is to investigate whether the differences in visualisation patterns are related to a viewer's previous training in design appreciation, and whether aesthetic visualisation is trainable in a short term. Forty-three female subjects, consisting of 20 trained and 23 untrained viewers, participated. Twenty fashion images, posed by a male and a female model, were shown on an eye-tracker screen for 10 s each. This study revealed that the trained viewer tended to show longer gaze duration and higher densities of fixations over the image, to be more sensitive to design changes, and to have less random scanning time, than the untrained viewer. Further, this study indicated that repetitive viewing of the same image in a short term was not an effective training mode of aesthetic visualisation.