Microsoft Links Eye-Gaze and Cursor Position

Microsoft recently completed an eye tracking web usability study that examined the association between a user’s gaze and the movement of the cursor over a search engine results page.

In the research paper, entitled “No Clicks, No Problem: Using Cursor Movements to Understand and Improve Search,“  Microsoft  details the correlation between a user’s eye position and the movement of their mouse. The study also looked at the issue of “Good Abandonment”, where a user abandons their search without actually clicking on a link because the information they needed was displayed on the results page, versus “Bad Abandonment”, where the user abandons the search because none of the displayed results were relevant to their search.

For the eye tracking part of the study, Microsoft used a Tobii X50 eye tracker and a cursor tracking program. Microsoft had 38 participants conduct 16 navigational and 16 informational search tasks. The eye tracking portion of the study concluded that there is a strong correlation between user gaze position and cursor position, and that the cursor is likely to be just below where the users gaze is directed.

Following the results of the eye tracking study, Microsoft decided to do a cursor movement study to determine if there was a relationship between cursor position, movement, click position, and search result relevancy.

The study points out that even though a user fails to click on a link, it does not always mean that the search results were not relevant. In fact, the study suggests that there may be a stronger correlation between the cursor hover rate and human relevance judgments than there is by measuring the click-through rates.

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