Less users more confidence: How AOIs don’t affect scanpath trend analysis

Keywords: eye tracking, scanpath, usability, sample size, region of interest, areas of interest, visual elements, web pages, segmentation, trending path, STA

Abstract

User studies are typically difficult, recruiting enough users is often problematic and each experiment takes a considerable amount of time to be completed. In these studies, eye tracking is increasingly used which often increases time, therefore, the lower the number of users required for these studies the better for making these kinds of studies more practical in terms of economics and time expended. The possibility of achieving almost the same results with fewer users has already been raised. Specifically, the possibility of achieving 75% similarity to the results of 65 users with 27 users for searching tasks and 34 users for browsing tasks has been observed in scanpath trend analysis which discovers the most commonly followed path on a particular web page in terms of its visual elements or areas of interest (AOIs). Different approaches are available to segment or divide web pages into their visual elements or AOIs. In this paper, we investigate whether the possibility raised by the previous work is restricted to a particular page segmentation approach by replicating the experiments with two other segmentation approaches. The results are consistent with ~5% difference for the searching tasks and ~10% difference for the browsing tasks.

Author Biography

Sukru Eraslan, Computer Engineering Program, Middle East Technical University Northern Cyprus Campus
I received my BSc in Information Systems Engineering from Cyprus International University in 2009 and I was the first ranked graduate. I then received my MSc in Information Technology (Data Engineering) from the University of Wolverhampton in 2011. After that, I completed my PhD in Computer Science at the University of Manchester in 2016. I am a post-doctoral researcher now in the Computer Engineering Program at Middle East Technical University Northern Cyprus Campus.
Published
2017-11-22
How to Cite
Eraslan, S., Yesilada, Y., & Harper, S. (2017). Less users more confidence: How AOIs don’t affect scanpath trend analysis. Journal of Eye Movement Research, 10(4). https://doi.org/10.16910/jemr.10.4.6
Section
Articles