Advancing Game Design with Eye-tracking and Think-aloud Studies

Paste the appropriate copyright statement here. ACM now supports three different copyright statements: • ACM copyright: ACM holds the copyright on the work. This is the historical approach. • License: The author(s) retain copyright, but ACM receives an exclusive publication license. • Open Access: The author(s) wish to pay for the work to be open access. The additional fee must be paid to ACM. This text field is large enough to hold the appropriate release statement assuming it is single spaced. Every submission will be assigned their own unique DOI string to be included here. Abstract Think-aloud protocols and eye-tracking studies have been shown to be valuable tools to evaluate different systems, such as websites, software, or games. Some first studies also suggest the combination of eye-tracking and think-aloud protocols to gain deeper insights in usability and design issues. The outcomes of this combined evaluation approach are often used to give feedback to design strategies. However, this combined evaluation approach is scarcely integrated in the design process. In this paper we explain how eye-tracking combined with think-aloud protocols can be used to redesign user interactions with an existing system with the goal to integrate game design elements and gamification strategies. This approach can be used already in early application stages to design and such systems before the integration of the main game design elements. In a first experiment, we use the outcomes of the combined evaluation approach to make first design decisions for gamification strategies. First findings indicate that a combination of think-aloud protocols with eye-tracking can give insights in the design of proper tasks goals and a fitting feedback design.