Using Eye Tracking & Mouse Movements to Analyze Search Behavior
For those in the business, it must be a pretty nice thing to see usability studies come of age. We’ve touched on recent debates regarding the relationship between what a user is looking at versus what they’re thinking about (Is it the same thing or is it something entirely different?), and it’s exciting to see further research into the details of eye tracking and usability. Data is easy to come by if you have the right equipment, but making sense of that data, analyzing it for usable information and gaining insight into the process is a much more difficult task.
Understanding web search behavior is crucial for improving the effectiveness of web search, and while much recent progress has focused on click logs, there’s really a wealth of information going unobserved when it comes to how someone explores a website. We see scientists coming up with models to explain how a human recognizes visual objects. For example, we are seeing progress in defining interactions on a website – mining interactions like mouse movements and scrolling, as stated in a recent study at Emory University, can enable more effective detection of a user’s search goals.
An improved understanding of searcher needs and interests is extremely important for search engines to keep users happy and produce satisfactory search results. In a recent paper published at Emory University called Ready to Buy or Just Browsing?, detecting Web Searcher Goals from Interaction Data, researchers say priority-based search results are not making the cut. Case and point – what if you’re simply searching for “blackberry” as opposed to “BlackBerry?” The challenge, the paper argues, is to identify the intent of the given search, contextualized with a search task. Previous studies, they write, have shown the effectiveness of eye tracking to identify user interests, but eye tracking, again, can often require expensive equipment (see Tobii’s new $40,000+ eye tracking glasses) which limit accessibility and applicability.
New work has shown, however, that the existence of coordination between the searcher’s gaze position and the mouse movement over the search results has led researchers to believe that “searcher interactions such as mouse movement and scrolling can help more accurately infer searcher intent and interest in the search results.” So, like eye movements, such actions can reflect a user’s intentions.
These actions can be captured and recorded with Javascript code that can be fed to web search sites like Google, allowing them to see what the searcher is paying most attention to and possibly provide more insight into how a user navigates around a page.
More and more, we’re seeing that the once solve-all approach has moved to the wayside as more supplementary studies can provide additional insight. It’s kind of a “many parts make a whole” sort of argument.
Ready to Buy or Just Browsing? Detecting Web Searcher Goals from Interaction Data
Related articles:
- Eye Tracking Provides Insight into Consumer Search Behavior
- Eye Tracking Emphasizes Significance of Search Snippets
- Eye Tracking Study Users in Interactive Search
- Can Eye Tracking be Used to Predict Strategic Behavior?
- Framework for Eye Tracking Patterns and Usability Problems: Pt 3
- Framework for Eye Tracking Patterns and Usability Problems: Pt 4
- The Latest in Eye Tracking Web Usability Research pt1
- The Latest in Eye Tracking Web Usability Research pt2
- Eye Tracking Questions Usefulness of Real Time Search Results
- Eye Tracking: Social Behavior and How We Look at Faces