Information seeking in the WWW: Detecting T-patterns in eye
movements and navigational behavior
D.C. Unz1, B. Werner1 and R. Mangold2
1Media and Organizational Psychology, Saarland University,
Saarbruecken, Germany
2Hochschule der Medien, Stuttgart, Germany
Using a search engine is one of the most commonly used services of the
internet. Half the
users spend more than 70% of their online-time seeking for information.
But nearly half the
users are frustrated about using a search engine. Therefore the question
how to facilitate
the processing of search result lists is posed. Whereas studies that address
this question
typically simply count certain aspects of users behavior, as the
opening of documents, or
look at the overall search times, the ongoing process over time is often
not addressed along
the timeline. The aim of our studies is to account for the temporal course
of users behavior
and address the process in time. In particular, we ask, what kind of heuristics
user do pursue
when inspecting result lists of search engines.
In a first study (42 subjects were presented with a search results page
that listed 25 web pages retrieved for a query about assessment
centre building blocks) we recorded subjects eye movements
and mouse clicks and looked at the order in which the search results were
processed. Most of the subjects seem to apply a sort of strict depth-.rst
strategy, a minority seems to apply a breadth-first strategy, and another
minority seems to apply a partially breadth-first strategy.
In a second study 50 subjects were asked to perform four tasks similar
to those of the first study. Again, subjects eye movements and mouse
clicks were recorded. The subjects were assigned to different simple
heuristics according their statements in a questionnaire. We asked
if we can find different (observable) behavior patterns of persons that
pursue different (unobservable) heuristics. To study the temporal course
of processing the search result list in detail, the observational records
of eye movements and mouse clicks are analyzed for its temporal and sequential
structure by the means of the T-pattern detection method proposed by Magnusson
and operationalized in the software Theme
(PatternVision Ltd, Iceland).
Paper presented
at Measuring Behavior 2005
, 5th International Conference on Methods and Techniques
in Behavioral Research, 30 August - 2 September 2005, Wageningen, The
Netherlands.
© 2005 Noldus
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