Evaluation of Web Search Performance on the Basis of Movement Characteristics of Mouse Pointer

Abstract

The aim of this paper was to evaluate Web search performance on the basis of the movement trajectory of mouse pointer. For all participants, less mouse movements were observed for the image-based link condition than for the character-based link condition. This tendency was more remarkable for older adults. More mouse movements were observed with the increase of the number of hyperlinks per Web page. When the layered structure was shallow, the following difference of mouse operation characteristics between young and older adults was observed: While older adults made an attempt to locate the search item while moving a mouse simultaneously, young adults began to move a mouse after locating the search item.