Abigail Austin MAAT 550-01 Quantifying the Media Experience
Could I have the Menu Please? An Eye Tracking Study of Design Conventions John D McCarthy, M Angela Sasse & Jens Riegelsberger
This article titled “Could I have the Menu Please? An Eye Tracking Study of Design Conventions” by John D McCarthy, M Angela Sasse & Jens Riegelsberger outlines eye tracking principles dating back to the 90’s and 2000’s. Experiments and findings from multiple studies are outlined in the article, giving the reader an overview of how eye tracking started and how it can be used. The article talks about different aspects of a webpage that draw the eye and how this information can be used to create a positive user experience. “Layering, separation, colours, and contrast” are important pieces of content that capture interest. Experiments have been conducted to determine how these page elements should be displayed.
A 2000 Stanford-Poynter study measures where users were looking on a page in the first three glances. It was found that attention was drawn to text rather than graphics which does not fit traditional findings. This type of data can be used when placing text and images on a webpage. A 1998 Ellis et al. study compared eye tracking results from three alternative page designs. The results showed that a book-like layout was the easiest to read, but the least popular among participants. A 2002 Goldberg et al. study used eye tracking to find a bias toward horizontal search rather than vertical search. It was also found that headings with strong information scent were frequently ignored.
The main study that this article focused on was the Menu Study. Nine different search tasks from the navigation menu were examined across three different sites. The sites varied in complexity in order to test whether less complex websites are easier to navigate. Each participant was instructed to find an item located on the left, right, and top of each page. It was predicted that users performance would be best with navigation items located on the left of the screen as this is a typical expected design. The effect of navigation menu position was not significant however, it was found that performance with a left sided menu was better only for their first page visit. The users expectation of where the navigation menu should be located proved to not be as important. Most users had little long-term effects on task performance when working on websites that violated their expectations. A significant difference was found between simple and complex sites. It took participants almost 50% longer to complete tasks on complex sites rather than simples sites. When creating a website designed for ease of use, these findings would be useful. One of the main findings was that users tend to focus a lot of eye movements on the middle of screens. This could prove to be useful when designing content and choosing a focal point for a website. Overall, this article provided a lot of information about the history of eye tracking and prior experiments that tested these main practices
