The People's Gaze: Co-Designing and Refining Gaze Gestures with General Users and Gaze Interaction Experts

TL;DR

This paper presents a user-centered methodology for designing intuitive gaze gestures for eye-tracking interfaces, combining non-expert input with expert refinement to create a natural and reliable gesture set.

Contribution

It introduces a two-phase co-design and refinement process that aligns gaze gestures with user intuition and expert ergonomics, filling a gap in current expert-designed gesture sets.

Findings

Non-experts develop gestures based on familiar metaphors.

Gestures follow a compositional grammar: activation plus action.

The final set is ergonomic, natural, and distinguishable.

Abstract

As eye-tracking becomes increasingly common in modern mobile devices, the potential for hands-free, gaze-based interaction grows, but current gesture sets are largely expert-designed and often misaligned with how users naturally move their eyes. To address this gap, we introduce a two-phase methodology for developing intuitive gaze gestures. First, four co-design workshops with 20 non-expert participants generated 102 initial concepts. Next, four gaze interaction experts reviewed and refined these into a set of 32 gestures. We found that non-experts, after a brief introduction, intuitively anchor gestures in familiar metaphors and develop a compositional grammar; i.e., activation (dwell) + action (gaze gesture or blink), to ensure intentionality and mitigate the classic Midas Touch problem. Experts prioritized gestures that are ergonomically sound, aligned with natural saccades, and reliably distinguishable. The resulting user-grounded, expert-validated gesture set, along with actionable design principles, provides a foundation for developing intuitive, hands-free interfaces for gaze-enabled devices.