Eye Movement Study On Visual Searching Of Web Page

Visual search is an important cognitive activity and tool which acquires knowledge and experience. With the fast development of Internet and the rapid expansion of information, the importance of web page based visual search is increasing obviously. In order to improve the efficiency of searching web page and the comfort of the search interface, designers should consider the visual parameters of human being. The problems including how to carry out a visual search, which strategy is adopted and which visual search model can be generated, etc. is studied to provide designers these parameters. Information will be recorded by eye tracker .Former studies indicated that various patterns of eye movements were connect with our mental changes, and the research of eye movements was considered to the most effective way in a visual process.The web page is a carrier of a great deal of information, which is used more and more in searching with the fast development of Internet. Under this environment, how to improve the efficiency of searching is the object we want to explore. The hypothesis of this study is that no matter children or adults, they all have interest visual areas, which will affect the searching time. Three experiments of eye movements were designed to confirm the hypothesis.A task of browsing the web page was performed in experiment 1 .We used eye tracker to record the number of fixation of zone. The results showed that no matter children or adults, the differences between zones were significant. They all had interest areas, respectively the fourth and fifth zones.In experiment 2, a task of searching phrases between 9 zones was performed. The eye tracker was used to record the response time, fixation duration, number of fixation, scanning distance and so on. According to the statistical results, the effects of different zones were very significant. The zones with target phrases have a great effect on response time. The average response time is lower in the first, second, third and fifth zones, which is higher in the eighth and ninth zones .It has a trend of increasing gradually, which would be a model of structural search. Participants were asked to search target words of a web page in experiment 3. The eye tracker was used to record the response time, fixation duration, number of fixation, scanning distance and so on.. The results showed that the effects of different zones were very significant. The zones with target words had a great effect on response time, indicating that the fourth interest visual areas affected the response time greatly. However, the response time of the fifth zone was higher, which was not in accordance with the interest area. We conclude that the time of searching central area would be prolonged under a complex searching environment because of the hustle of other information around.To sum up, the experiments of web page visual search confirmed the hypothesis initially, that is the effects between zones were very significant. We used advanced eye movement technique and gained accurate dates, analyzing the possible factors affecting the response time of searching. All of the finds can be the guidelines for web page design and information arrangement, providing the visual parameters and accomplishing a man-machine interface which focuses on the consumers.