Article

Eye tracking in web search tasks: design implications

Authors:

Joseph H. Goldberg,

Mark J. Stimson,

Marion Lewenstein,

Anna M. WichanskyAuthors Info & Claims

ETRA '02: Proceedings of the 2002 symposium on Eye tracking research & applications

Pages 51 - 58

https://doi.org/10.1145/507072.507082

Published: 25 March 2002 Publication History

Abstract

An eye tracking study was conducted to evaluate specific design features for a prototype web portal application. This software serves independent web content through separate, rectangular, user-modifiable portlets on a web page. Each of seven participants navigated across multiple web pages while conducting six specific tasks, such as removing a link from a portlet. Specific experimental questions included (1) whether eye tracking-derived parameters were related to page sequence or user actions preceding page visits, (2) whether users were biased to traveling vertically or horizontally while viewing a web page, and (3) whether specific sub-features of portlets were visited in any particular order. Participants required 2-15 screens, and from 7-360+ seconds to complete each task. Based on analysis of screen sequences, there was little evidence that search became more directed as screen sequence increased. Navigation among portlets, when at least two columns exist, was biased towards horizontal search (across columns) as opposed to vertical search (within column). Within a portlet, the header bar was not reliably visited prior to the portlet's body, evidence that header bars are not reliably used for navigation cues. Initial design recommendations emphasized the need to place critical portlets on the left and top of the web portal area, and that related portlets do not need to appear in the same column. Further experimental replications are recommended to generalize these results to other applications.

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Eye tracking in web search tasks: design implications
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Published In

cover image ACM Conferences

ETRA '02: Proceedings of the 2002 symposium on Eye tracking research & applications

March 2002

156 pages

ISBN:1581134673

DOI:10.1145/507072

Conference Chair:
Andrew T. Duchowski
Clemson University
,
Program Chairs:
Roel Vertegaal
Queens University (Canada)
,
John W. Senders
University of Toronto (Canada)

Copyright © 2002 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Published: 25 March 2002

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ETRA02: Eye Tracking Research and Application

March 25 - 27, 2002

Louisiana, New Orleans

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ETRA '02 Paper Acceptance Rate 18 of 29 submissions, 62%;

Overall Acceptance Rate 69 of 137 submissions, 50%

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https://doi.org/10.15198/seeci.2024.57.e893
Salminen JJung SJansen B(2024)Investigating Persona Viewing Behavior: An Eye-Tracking Study on Portrait-Format Persona ProfileProceedings of the 13th Nordic Conference on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/3679318.3685376(1-12)Online publication date: 13-Oct-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3679318.3685376
Chiossi FGruenefeld UHou BNewn JOu CLiao RWelsch RMayer S(2024)Understanding the Impact of the Reality-Virtuality Continuum on Visual Search Using Fixation-Related Potentials and Eye Tracking FeaturesProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/36765288:MHCI(1-33)Online publication date: 24-Sep-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3676528
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Molina AArroyo YLacave CRedondo MBravo COrtega M(2024)Eye tracking-based evaluation of accessible and usable interactive systems: tool set of guidelines and methodological issuesUniversal Access in the Information Society10.1007/s10209-023-01083-xOnline publication date: 11-Jan-2024
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