# Observing Pictures and Videos of Creative Products: An Eye Tracking Study
## 1 Introduction
At a first stage, it is of special interest to understand if a correlation exists between the abstraction degree of products' representations and the depth of their related evaluations. Therefore, the authors collected a sample of scientific contributions in which products have been evaluated. Table 1 shows in detail how the contributions have been organized relating the forms of representation used by scholars (rows) with the kind of evaluations that have been made (columns). The forms of representation have been arranged with an increasing order of design detail starting from \"text\", when users were only provided with a description or written details of the object. Next to the text are \"images\", which can be further differentiated into sketches, photos, and photorealistic images. Images with text integration have been classified as \"text + images\". Other representation forms are \"videos\", which are not particularly widespread as a whole, while \"Virtual prototypes\", \"Virtual Reality\" (VR), \"Virtual/Mixed Reality\" represent products as if they were in their final stages of design, with a high degree of detail but with a lower level of interaction than \"physical prototypes\" and \"end-use products\". Consequently, the latter are mainly involved at the end of the whole design process. The authors further classified the representation forms into three categories of stimuli: static, dynamic, and physical ones, as apparent from Table 1. The classes are considered self-explanatory and intuitive, so that no clarifications for the rationale behind this categorization are given. In particular, in the very early stages of design, it is necessary to use static and dynamic stimuli because physical objects are not available. Likewise, it is supposed that more insightful evaluations and interactive experiences take place as the design process progresses. However, it has emerged that there is no balance between the use of static and dynamic stimuli. It is worth noting that the matching of representation forms and evaluation scopes does not give rise to any strong relations between the former and the latter, as the table is not populated by references on the diagonal or in specific quadrants only. In addition, Table 1 clearly shows scholars' preference in using the former more diffusedly than the latter whatever the evaluation objectives. As aforementioned, images are the most leveraged form of representation; indeed, they are used for each kind of evaluation examined (particularly, to evaluate user experience, attractiveness, and value perception). \begin{table}
\begin{tabular}{c c c c c c c c c c} \hline
**Stimuli** & \multicolumn{2}{c}{**Form of Representation**} & \multicolumn{1}{c}{**User Experience**} & \multicolumn{1}{c}{**Satisfaction**} & \multicolumn{1}{c}{**Cognitive Perception**} & \multicolumn{1}{c}{**Preferences**} & \multicolumn{1}{c}{**Attractiveness**} & \multicolumn{1}{c}{**Value Perception**} & \multicolumn{1}{c}{**Affordances**} & \multicolumn{1}{c}{**Emotions**} \\ \hline Static & Text & [1,13] & [13] & [14] & [1,15] & & & & & \\ \hline Static & Images & [1,  
As already stated, forms of representation substantially affect user-product interaction and consequently product evaluation [7, 8]. However, there is a lack of studies focusing on this aspect; actually, most scholars adopt forms of representation based on availability or convenience, as their focus is steadily on users' evaluations and feedback, rather than leveraged inputs. Even in contributions that use multiple forms of representation for the same product to compare the outputs of different evaluations [1, 2, 13], scholars' aims have not targeted users' observation strategies during the interaction with stimuli. It can also be remarked that the study of interactions with stimuli can nowadays benefit from systems and technologies that allow scholars to analyze people's behavior insightfully.