Gaze Analysis Method for Web Site Usability Evaluation

Abstract

Evaluation of Web usability with the help of gaze information involves plotting the gaze locus and estimating the gaze duration for an image on a Web page. From the output image, an evaluator can determine the browsing order and time for a Web page. In this method, input is required from the observer (at the position of the gaze) and the evaluator. Therefore, considerable time is required for analysis. However, evaluation of Web usability is often performed at limited cost. The proposed method uses HTML features to automatically identify the objects viewed by an observer. In an HTML document, a DIV tag is often used to separate the content areas according to a specific style. The output of the developped tool is the gaze area and gaze time in a time series. The features of each content area are compared. Thus, by using the proposed method to evaluate Web page and Web site usability, gaze information, which was analyzed qualitatively earlier, can be analyzed quantitatively.