Integrating Eye Tracking, Feature Use, and Emotional Valence: A Multimodal Approach to Evaluating Search Interfaces
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Interactive Information Retrieval (IIR) interfaces are typically evaluated using questionnaires that gather post-task subjective measures such as ease of use, usefulness, satisfaction, and user engagement, along with in-task objective measures derived from log analysis.However, a comprehensive evaluation requires a deeper understanding of user behaviour beyond such traditional measures.Integrating eye tracking data with logged feature use and emotional valence provides a multimodal approach to evaluating a search interface at the feature level.To validate this approach, we examined three search interfaces in a controlled laboratory study focused on exploratory search within the context of digital humanities archives.A key benefit of this multimodal approach is that it allows us to evaluate both traditional interaction with the search interface (looking at a feature, using it, and experiencing an emotional response) as well as passive interaction with the search interface (looking at a feature, choosing not to use it but possibly getting information from it, and experiencing an emotional response).Using this approach, we were able to identify specific features of the interfaces that generated positive and negative emotional valence responses when used, as well as features that generated such emotional valence responses when viewed but not used.Such feature-level assessments would be difficult to capture using other means, providing insight into the nature of the searchers' experiences using the search interfaces.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".