An Improved Design For The Interface Layout Of Online Courses Based On Link Analysis And Mouse Tracks

Online courses are becoming a hot trend in this century,and the number of online courses and their learners has increased significantly.The interface of the online course is an information-intensive interactive interface,and its layout will exert influence on the learning outcome of learners.Therefore,it is necessary to analyze the usability of the interface layout of online courses with the aim to optimize the interface layout of the online courses,enhance the efficiency of learners attending the online courses,and reduce the interference caused by interface design.This thesis combines link analysis and mouse tracking to study the usability of the interface layout of the online course.Twenty subjects are invited to participate in a controlled experiment,who are divided into two groups at random.As regards the control group,ten subjects are asked to watch the online course with the original interface.With mouse tracks,the visual search behavior of the ten subjects on the interface of the online course will be recorded,which includes the movement path of the mouse,the number of clicks,and the immobility time of the cursor.And the visual search behavior will be turned into experimental data.After watching the network curriculum,verbal protocols are adopted to record learner’s satisfaction with the interface of the online class.Then through the link analysis,the link relations between the various components of the interface layout of the online course are revealed,including the frequency of the two clicked components and the importance of the link chains.After optimizing the interface of the online course based on the outcome of link analysis,the rest of the subjects are required to watch the online course whose interface is optimized.Then the experiment is carried out in the same experimental procedure,and experimental data is collected.Through the paired sample T-test,it is found that the effectiveness and engagement of usability are 0.004 and 0.001 respectively,and their p-value is less than 0.05.Therefore,the effectiveness and engagement of the two interfaces are significantly different.The effectiveness of the interface is improved,and the efficiency of learners using the online course platform is promoted.Since the number of clicks represents the effectiveness of usability,and by comparing the average number of clicks of two experiments,it can be found that the effectiveness of the experimental group is slightly improved.As regards the clicks path,the distance between components is dramatically shortened,especially the distance between components used frequently,which increases the usability of the interface.Comparing the link relations between the initial interface and the optimized interface,the optimized layout interface has a shorter path between closely-related elements than the initial interface does,and it is more concise in visual.According to the verbal protocol,it is found that learners are more satisfied with the optimized layout of the interface than the initial interface layout.This research can provide a data-driven method for the evaluation of the usability of the interface layout of the online videos;it can also offer some insight into the optimization of the interface layout of online videos.