Eye Tracking in the Design and Evaluation of Digital Libraries Bing Pan, PhD, Geri Gay, PhD, Helene Hembrooke, PhD, Laura Granka, Matt Feusner HCI Group Department of Communication and Information Science Cornell University http://www.hci.cornell.edu

Eyes are Windows to the Soul!

Eye Tracking Experiment ASL’s 504 commercial eye-tracker (Applied Science Technologies, Bedford, MA)

Eye Tracking Measurements Micro-level of information processing Fixation: Indication of attention Intensive information processing during fixations; Saccade: Indication of movement of attention Information processing is suppressed.

Eye Tracking Example Scanpaths Fixations Saccades

Previous Research Eyes are drawn to informative areas (Rayner, 1998); Complex information leads to longer fixation duration; Fixation numbers are indication of importance of visual display (Fitts et al., 1950); Difficult task leads to longer saccade (Takahashi et al., 2000); Different tasks lead to different eye movement behavior (Hayhoe et al., 2002).

Study I: Eye Tracking Research on Web Pages 30 Subjects, 22 web pages from 11 most popular web sites from four categories (news, shopping, search, and business); Half of subjects are asked to memorize the content; 30 seconds of viewings; Demographic data and recall were measured.

Area of Interest (Lookzone) Analysis

Where are the visually salient areas? Do people look at those?

Where do people look on a web page?

Illuminating visually salient areas...

Using illumination as another representation...

Study I Research Results (under review): Males spent more time on fixations; females spent more time on saccades; The adjustment of people’s eye movement behavior on different pages; Complexity of web pages leads to complex scanpaths…

Study II. Eye Tracking in DL MetaTest Research How users of DLs use metadata and process metadata? Test on three conditions: Records with descriptions; Records with Metadata; Records with both descriptions and metadata.

DL collections with descriptions…

DL collections with metadata…

DL collections with both descriptions and metadata…

Study II MetaTest Initial Results Titles and sources are the mostly viewed metadata; The first few sentences in the description are read more carefully; the rest of them are skimmed; Before selection, a re-visit of the records for confirmation; Subjects focus on descriptions when both descriptions and metadata are on the same page.

Application in DL Design and Evaluation Which areas attract people’s attention? How can we capture their attention? Which areas are left out by viewers’ eyes? How can we design individualized interface? How does their attention switch from one page to another? What is the average scanpath on a web page?

Conclusion Eye tracking can be a powerful tool in DL evaluations and usability testing; Interface can be improved based on eye tracking results; Comparison between alternative interfaces.

Future Directions From information retrieval to learning community; Will people use social navigation tools by attending to those social elements? Testing the prototypes before actually spending money designing them.