Eye Tracking Analysis in Reading Online Newspapers

Abstract

Reading online newspapers is increasingly becoming more common, so that thousands of newspapers are published online today. Despite this development, there are many unanswered questions concerning subjects’ behaviour during reading an online newspapers. Recording eye movements when a subject is navigating within a news website can provide quantitative and objective information on subject’s behaviour and combined with other methodologies – usability testing, focus groups, log analysis - represents a powerful tool for improving news websites functionality, and by consequence their achievement among readers. Two Italian newspaper websites have been considered for the study described in this paper and the analysis has been focused on the exploration behaviour within the newspaper home page and the reading of article pages.

Online newspapers and ad banners: an eye tracking study on the effects of congruity

“…An important lesson learned was that the position of ad banners affects the way users look at them (the best location being the left column). Other interesting research includes the works by Holmqvist et al (2003) and Zambarbieri et al (2008), both focused on the way online newspapers are read. Recently Ferreira et al (2011) examined the impact of verbal emotional cues in capturing attention on advertising regions of a news portal.…”

Calidad web en medios digitales: revisión bibliográfica sobre métodos e indicadores de evaluación general y atributos de confianza

“…Solamente cuatro de los estudios están basados en experimentación directa con usuarios: Zambarbieri et al (2008) utilizan el método de rastreo ocular en la lectura (eye tracking) aplicado a periódicos italianos; Aranyi et al, (2012) basan su trabajo en pruebas psicométricas en sitios de noticias; mientras que Yu y Kong (2016) realizan test A/B sobre navegación web en pantallas pequeñas.…”

“…Tal es el caso del comercio electrónico, la educación, la sanidad, el gobierno, el turismo o los medios de comunicación (Pedraza-Jiménez et al, 2016). Ejemplos de estos últimos instrumentos de evaluación de calidad web focalizados en cibermedios encontramos en trabajos pioneros como los de Abdullah y Wei (2008), basado en heurísticas de usabilidad; Zambarbieri et al (2008), que aplica la técnica de eyetracking o seguimiento ocular; Rodríguez-Martínez et al (2010), análisis experto destinado a analizar la adopción de la Web 2.0; Al-Radaideh et al (2011), sustentado en el estudio de usuarios; Chung et al (2012), sobre la base de encuestas; o el protocolo de análisis de contenidos propuesto por Martins (2012).…”

The Mechanisms of “Incidental News Consumption”: an Eye Tracking Study of News Interaction on Facebook

“…Much more research has been devoted to multimodal stimuli from sources other than digital media (Kurzhals, Fisher, Burch, & Weiskopf, 2016). Studies have found that verbal cues tend to receive more attention than images on billboards (Grigaliūnaitė et al, 2016;Zantides & Kourdis, 2014), newspapers (Holsanova, Rahm, & Holmqvist, 2006), stories in online newspapers (Zambarbieri, Carniglia, & Robino, 2008), or when simple images and simple verbal texts are combined (Arndt, Schüler, & Scheiter, 2015). All these studies suggest that texts receive more visual fixations, regardless of the size, color, place, and nature of images.…”