Enhanced representation of web pages for usability analysis with eye tracking

Abstract

Eye tracking as a tool to quantify user attention plays a major role in research and application design. For Web page usability, it has become a prominent measure to assess which sections of a Web page are read, glanced or skipped. Such assessments primarily depend on the mapping of gaze data to a Web page representation. However, current representation methods, a virtual screenshot of the Web page or a video recording of the complete interaction session, suffer either from accuracy or scalability issues. We present a method that identifies fixed elements on Web pages and combines user viewport screenshots in relation to fixed elements for an enhanced representation of the page. We conducted an experiment with 10 participants and the results signify that analysis with our method is more efficient than a video recording, which is an essential criterion for large scale Web studies.