Measuring Behavior 2005: Indergand and Mueller

e&t attentiontracker: Measuring the visual conspicuity of elements on web pages, an evaluation study

R. Indergand and Ch. Mueller

Ergonomie & technologie (e&t) GmbH, Zürich, Switzerland

As in advertising, online information works best if the users can immediately grasp the message. There is no easy to use and valid method for measuring what the viewers actually perceive and which elements are eye-catching. The eye tracking method can measure the physiological movement of the eyes but not what information the viewers process, store and recollect consciously. Therefore the e&t attentiontracker^® was developed to measure the actually perceived elements on web pages, advertising media, instruction manuals etc. The e&t attentiontracker allows to identify the conspicuous elements and the ranking of their conspicuity. A web page is brie.y presented to subjects several times. After every presentation, they are asked to reiterate what they have seen on the web page. With this method it is possible to detect and rate the elements that were perceived consciously. In the present study we evaluated the method of the e&t attentiontracker. We first built three different web pages. On each of these pages two small changes were made, thus creating two additional, slightly different versions. These changes were in eg. colour, size or placing of an element in order to shift its level of conspicuity. The 9 pages were then tested with 20 subjects each. Differences in the conspicuity of the changed elements were analyzed with the Kolmogorov-Smirnov test. Results showed that the e&t attentiontracker is able to measure even slight differences in the conspicuity of elements on a web page. This evaluation study proved that the e&t attentiontracker effectively measures conspicuity of web page elements. It can be a valuable instrument in usability testing, branding studies or rating of design proposals.

Paper presented at Measuring Behavior 2005 , 5^th International Conference on Methods and Techniques in Behavioral Research, 30 August - 2 September 2005, Wageningen, The Netherlands.