Tracking Eye Movements on the BBC News Website

In a recent exploratory study, we recorded users' eye movements as they browsed the BBC News Manchester Web pages. Participants searched for links to the BBC Manchester website and a story about the local Chinese community on either the standard or text-only versions of the page. Our results show, both qualitatively and quantitatively, that the removal of visual presentation cues impacts upon search behaviour.

The following two images show gaze plots for each task performed on the standard site. Participants' eyes dart around the page as they attempt to locate visually the next most likely location for the link.

Contrast this with the text-only version in which participants appear to simply read down the page in a serial fashion.

The following set of images show gaze hotspots - the areas that received the most fixations - in the standard and text-only versions of the page. Participants frequently fixated on salient areas, such as bold text and images, when searching the standard page. Areas receiving the most attention also varied according to the task. People were more likely to look at menus, for example, when searching for the BBC Manchester website link (as shown in the left hand image below). In contrast, on the text-only version of the page participants fixated in a more uniform fashion, focusing on the text on the left hand side of the page and scanning briefly along lines to the right. Further information about this study can be found in our paper How people use presentation to search for a link.

Directed attention home

Comparing saliency maps and eye movement data

Using multimodal cues to direct the user's attention

The directed attention project is funded by the EPSRC under grant EP/D036518/1 (Sept 2005 - July 2006).