What users do: the eyes have it

Paul Thomas (CSIRO and ANU)

CSIRO ICT IR and friends

DATE: 2013-11-11
TIME: 16:00:00 - 17:00:00
LOCATION: CSIRO seminar room
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ABSTRACT:
Search engine result pages - the so-called ten blue links - are a staple of document retrieval services. The usual presumption is that users read these one-by-one "from the top", making judgements about the usefulness of documents based on the snippets presented, accessing the underlying document when a snippet seems attractive, and then moving on to the next snippet.

In this talk I'll re-examine that assumption, and give the results of a user experiment in which gaze-tracking is combined with click analysis. In very general terms, users do indeed read from the top, but there are more complex which suggest we might need a more sophisticated model of user interaction. In particular, users seem to retain a number of snippets in an "active band" that shifts down the result page, and reading and clicking activity tends to takes place within the band in a manner that is not strictly sequential.

This is work with Falk Scholer and Alistair Moffat.

http://es.csiro.au/