Can eye movements be effectively measured to assess product design?: Gender differences should be considered

This study investigates the relationship between eye movements and user emotional response to product features using eighteen product images as stimuli. The stimuli are composed of unpleasant, neutral and pleasant images. Regarding the emotional design, gender difference could be a major factor that should be taken into consideration. A task-free eye-tracking experiment was conducted in which forty participants (20 males and 20 females, mean age = 35.6, SD = 6.38, range 21–48 years) looked at randomly displayed product images. The eye movements of participants were measured while viewing product images. After viewing stimuli, participants rated immediately their emotional response to the product images on a seven-point scale. The results revealed that stimuli category and gender difference, caused different variations in fixation count, fixation duration, pupil diameter, and hit ratio. For stimuli category, participants have larger fixation count, fixation duration, pupil diameter, and hit ratio in response to pleasant and neutral product images than unpleasant product images. For gender difference, the results indicated that females provided larger scores in fixation count and fixation duration, but a smaller score in hit ratio in all stimuli than that provided by males. However, the measurement of pupil diameter yielded different results. The results showed that females provided larger pupil diameter in pleasant and neutral product images but a smaller pupil diameter in unpleasant product images than that provided by males, which is consistent with the result of subjective ratings. These findings could enable industrial counselors, product designers, and academics to categorize emotional response that can be subsequently incorporated into final product design. An understanding of gender-based processing differences of product features is important to designers since it enables them to communicate with these different market segments and to produce effective products for each segment. •Pleasant and neutral product images could evoke significantly larger eye movements than unpleasant product images.•Females provided larger scores in fixation count and fixation duration than males but smaller in hit ratio.•Females provided larger pupil diameters in pleasant and neutral stimuli than males but smaller in unpleasant stimuli.•Females were likely to spend time on the details, while males paid more attention to the outline of product features.