Eye movement research
points to importance of text over graphics on websites
BY KATHLEEN O'TOOLE
A picture is said to be
worth a thousand words, but perhaps not on the Internet,
at least as we know it today.
Text plays a more
important role than graphics as entry points for online
news, according to preliminary analysis of research
conducted at Stanford and the Poynter Institute, a
Florida-based nonprofit teaching and research institution
on journalism. This contrasts with an earlier Poynter
study, which found that readers of print newspapers
looked first at the lead art element on a newspaper page
and then moved their eyes to the biggest headline.
Using advanced
eye-movement interpretation technology developed at
Stanford's Center for the Study of Language and
Information (CSLI), the researchers in the current study
tracked the online news reading patterns of 67 people in
the Chicago and St. Petersburg, Fla., areas. The
participants used their own definitions of news and
selected the sites they wanted to read from their own
list of web page bookmarks.
Participants
in the Stanford-Poynter project were set up with head
gear to track their eye movements as they read online
news.
"General news
providers should be encouraged by our results, because we
found readers are paying attention to general news on the
web, and not just reading about their particular
interests," said Marion Lewenstein, Stanford
professor emerita of communication and the principal
investigator on the project. "Serendipity still
plays a role in what people read. They look around a web
news page, and when their eye catches something, they
read it."
The Stanford-Poynter study
found online readers often fixating first on news briefs
(short summaries of stories) or captions. In analyzing
the eye-movement patterns, the researchers noticed that
most readers' eyes shifted to the photos and
illustrations on the screen, but only after clicking on a
brief to get to a complete article and then returning to
the page with the illustration or photograph.
The difference cannot be
totally explained by the longer time it takes to display
some graphics on web pages, Lewenstein said, because the
readers in the study were using fast computers on fast
networks where the delay in graphics loading was about 2
seconds or less.
Preliminary results also
indicate that online readers were willing to scroll down
screen pages to read a long story. "Of the stories
our web users called up, there was vertical reading
behavior down to at least 75 percent of the length of the
page," Lewenstein said. "In the 10-year-old
study of people reading print newspapers, people on
average read only about 20 percent of a story."
The conclusions are
preliminary because the researchers intend to do more
analysis and post additional results on the Poynter
website as they become available. Because the human eye
rarely fixates on a point for more than a second, it
requires an enormous amount of data to analyze for
meaningful patterns. The 67 participants, who read news
for an average of 34 minutes each, tallied up a total of
608,063 eye fixations and 24,530 mouseclicks.
Related
Information:
Eye-aware software
The participants wore a
lightweight head-mounted device originally developed by
the military for tracking eye movements and later adapted
by market researchers. Using software developed under the
direction of Gregory Edwards, a researcher at Stanford's
CSLI, the research team was able to computer-record the
participants' eye movements and keyboard strokes as well
as the screen images displayed to them.
In addition to Edwards and
Lewenstein, the research team included psychologist
Deborah Tatar, a CSLI research associate, and Andrew
Devigal, a Poynter fellow and expert in online design.
When people are reading
English, their eye fixations follow a "right, right,
sudden-left" pattern that can distinguish reading
from other types of looking behavior, Edwards said. While
the current study is one way to apply the technology, he
and other CSLI researchers say they also hope to develop
"eye-aware" software that people can use to
control technology. As examples, they suggest an elevator
in which riders can select a floor simply by looking at
the floor number on an information panel, a phone support
application that eases the workload of operators, and an
"eye-mouse" that would make it possible for a
paralyzed person to gain full control of a computer with
eye movements.
Study results
"positive for democracy"
Participants in the
Poynter study were volunteers who responded to online
newspaper ads, so the results cannot be generalized to
all online readers. Nevertheless, the study enables
researchers to draw such general conclusions as the
relative importance of text over graphics as entry
points, at least among those who are relatively heavy
online news seekers.
The results should be
encouraging to people who have worried that the new
technology might cause people to read only news tailored
to their interests, Lewenstein said. Such specialized
reading patterns would tend to lead to less well informed
voters, a problem for democracies, she said. The readers
in this study did look for news on specialized sites,
such as those devoted to stock market reports, sporting
or entertainment news, and even drugstore sites and
corporate press release sites. "But the majority
begin their news reading with general news providers,
they go back to them more frequently, and spend more
total time with them," Lewenstein said. General news
providers included local and national newspapers and
broadcast providers.
Another indication that
people define news as broader than their own interests
comes from the attention they gave to opinions expressed
on the websites, Lewenstein said. Study participants read
at least part of 58 percent of all the brief summaries of
editorials, letters to the editor and columnists' views
presented on the web pages they looked at. When full
opinion articles were presented on a page they called to
their screen, 90 percent of the articles had some reading
in them.
Not all graphic artists
who have heard about the study in seminars believe the
findings about text's relative importance to art, Devigal
said. Some felt the art is currently less salient because
of present screen size and image resolutions.
Lewenstein pointed out
that the research team had analyzed the page entry points
only for the first page looked at by every fifth subject
and some of those pages did not have both art and text
for comparison. "We want to check more pages per
subject, and perhaps more subjects, to see if this
pattern continues to hold up," she said.
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