User Experience Terms for BCS Foundation Certificate in UX Practice Test 2025 - Free UX Practice Questions and Study Guide

A heat map is a data visualization technique that uses color coding to represent different values in a two-dimensional space. In the context of user experience, it specifically indicates areas where users’ attention is primarily focused on a screen, usually by highlighting these areas in warmer colors like red and yellow. This allows designers and researchers to quickly identify which parts of a webpage or application are attracting the most attention from users and which are being ignored. Effective use of heat maps can inform design decisions, leading to more user-centric interfaces by optimizing layout based on actual usage patterns.

The other visual representation options serve different purposes. A gaze plot typically shows the sequence and path of a user's visual attention over time, useful for understanding eye movement but not necessarily for indicating overall focus areas in terms of intensity. A redirection map may focus on user navigation paths and how they move through an interface rather than where they are looking. A behavioral map tends to track interactions and user behavior rather than visually representing attention concentration on a screen.