Comparison of eye movements in searching for easy-to-find and hard-to-find information in a hierarchically organized information structure

Finding information by successively selecting hyperlinks on web pages is a typical task performed on websites. A number of web usability studies have provided important insights about how web visitors carry out a search, and have concluded that "following information scent" is the fundamental process involved in the behavior. The purpose of this paper is to explore the relationship between the strength of information scent and web visitors'eye movements. Four web page types with different usability problems were considered. In an eyetracking experiment, eleven participants were asked to find an article on a simulated encyclopedia website by first selecting a heading from among nine provided headings, then selecting the appropriate topic link under the selected heading. The number of eye fixations, the duration of the fixations, and the task completion times were analyzed. The eye-tracking study reported in this paper added further insight to the knowledge gained from traditional web usability studies, in which visitors'performance are measured by the total number of clicks and task completion times. Website visitors'performance will not exhibit any differences in the initial heading selection stage irrespective of whether or not the pages have usability problems. However, performance will deteriorate in terms of the total number of fixations in the subsequent link selection stage when the web page has any kind of usability problem.