The uncanny valley phenomenon, which explains the discomfort people feel when encountering objects that seem almost human, has become more relevant with the increasing exposure to realistic 3D objects. This increase highlights the necessity to understand human perceptions when interacting with human-like characters. An experimental study was conducted using an eye tracker to explore this phenomenon through qualitative and quantitative data collection in two rounds. The first round (exposure) examined participants’ eye-gaze behavior when viewing 14 images of either a male or female portrait. The second round (assessment) explored their perception of the same images. The results showed that the comfort level of the participants decreased simultaneously with the decrease of the humanness present in the portraits, but the phenomenon did not occur. There was a difference in pupil dilation and eye fixation based on the image's gender. Participants mostly focused on the eyes and nose when assessing the humanness of an image, suggesting that irregularities or distortions in these facial features may contribute to the phenomenon.

Abstract As more people participate in gambling online, adding focus to the interaction design aspect of responsible gambling and related tools can improve their use and the goal of reducing gambling harm. An example of such an experiment was conducted to explore how receiving a message about a recent increase in risky gambling behavior can potentially influence and encourage players to set or change playing limits, take a break from playing, or complete a self-assessment. The message was set up as an A/B test with two types of message framing without a control group and was carried out live on the Norsk Tipping app and website, sent to 122,214 players over the span of two and a half months. The results show that roughly one in three went on to get further information, with more players doing so of those who received a message using general framing than negative framing, and one in ten decided to take some form of action based on the information they received, with negative framing being more effective in this percentage wise.

Each cookie consent interface has a different design variant, featuring various levels of information details, which makes the interaction highly challenging. This study aimed to explore how users' visual attention differs across different variants of cookie consent interfaces. To conduct the study, we designed an experiment testing three cookie consent variants, representing good, suboptimal, and bad design practices. Study results showed that none of the participants read the text on the interfaces. Most participants admitted skipping over the text about the cookie notice and did not carefully consider the options related to cookie consent. Notably, the bad design variant proved to be statistically significantly the most challenging for participants to make decisions, as evidenced by the highest total duration of fixation and number of fixations. However, participants spent a longer average fixation duration when the interface included both poor and decent design practices. Study results highlight the impact of interface design, banner location, content, and options presented on visual attention, indicating the necessity of establishing design guidelines to facilitate users in navigating cookie consent interfaces easily.