创意思维与方法 创意思维与方法 61SURL-Eye Gaze Patterns while Searching vs. Browsing a Website （3）.docxVIP

RESULTS AND DISCUSSION Gaze Patterns While Viewing a Picture Page Hotspot plots for the browsing task and the search task are shown in Figures 3 and 4. When browsing this page, the users scanned the categories in a horizontal pattern (left to right and right to left) line by line. It should be noted that the area visible when the page displayed (i.e., area above the fold) received the most fixations even though all users scrolled the page as they browsed. Figure 3. Hotspot plot while browsing the product categories. The area below the fold of this page was located below the fourth row of product categories. When searching specifically for the backpack category, users appeared to follow a less systematic scan path. Eye tracking of the page was stopped immediately after the target category was identified. For this reason the hotspot plot below shows very light exposure to the areas other than the target area of interest. Figure 4. Hotspot plot for the backpack category search task. A sample of individual gaze plots from users browsing the page (top 3 screenshots in Figure 5) also show the left to right search pattern. The gaze plots of searching for the backpack category (bottom 3 screenshots in Figure 5) show that the users followed a more random path. Figure 5. Gaze plots for browsing (top) and searching (bottom) a page of product categories. (The blue circle indicates the duration of fixation with larger circles representing longer fixations; and the blue lines connecting the dots indicate the saccade path) Figure 6 shows the hotspot plot for the search for the nonexistent Mountain Bike category. The user gazed almost uniformly across all the categories with the heaviest concentration in the top left. Figure 6. Hotspot plot while searching for the nonexistent Mountain Bike category. Further investigation of the individual gaze plots, shown in Figure 7, shows how each user followed a unique and random path while searching for the nonexistent Mountain Bike category.