Virtual Finger-Point Reading Behaviors: A Case Study of Mouse Cursor Movements on a Website

Web analytics has changed significantly in recent years. As part of the big data revolution, frequent low-level user actions, such as mouse movements and clicks, are often used in modern web analytics. Various studies show that when a user moves or clicks the mouse, the position of the mouse cursor is relatively close to the position of the eye gaze on the screen. Accordingly, mouse cursor positions can indicate user attention and interest in specific areas of web pages. This study focuses on mouse movement directions and speeds rather than on mouse cursor positions. A statistical analysis of mouse movements on an online learning website, which was selected for this study, sheds light on several interesting patterns. For example, most mouse movements in the examined usage data are either approximately horizontal or approximately vertical, and horizontal mouse movements are more frequent than vertical mouse movements. Besides, horizontal movements to the left are not equivalent to horizontal movements to the right, in terms of moving time and speed. As this study shows, these statistical findings are related to Pointer Assisted Reading (PAR), a reading behavior consisting of moving the mouse cursor (also known as the mouse pointer) along sentences, marking the reading position, similarly to finger-pointing when reading a book. Associating mouse movements with text reading may potentially highlight content that most users tend to skip, and therefore, might not interest the website's audience, as well as content that many readers read more than once or slowly, suggesting a lack of clarity or ambiguity. As discussed in this paper, this could be useful in locating issues in the textual content of websites and especially in online learning and educational technology applications.