Eye tracking scanpath analysis techniques on web pages: A survey, evaluation and comparison

Abstract

Eye tracking has commonly been used to investigate how users interact with web pages, with the goal of improving their usability. This article comprehensively revisits the techniques that could be applicable to eye tracking data for analysing user scanpaths on web pages. It also uses a third-party eye tracking study to compare these techniques. This allows researchers to recognise existing techniques for their goals, understand how they work and know their strengths and limitations so that they can make an efficient choice for their studies. These techniques can mainly be used for calculating similarities/dissimilarities between scanpaths, computing transition probabilities between web page elements, detecting patterns in scanpaths and identifying common scanpaths. The scanpath analysis techniques are classified into four groups by their goals so that researchers can directly focus on the appropriate techniques for a sequential analysis of user scanpaths on web pages. This article also suggests dealing with the limitations of these techniques by pre-processing eye tracking data, considering cognitive processing and addressing their reductionist approach.

Gaze Behavior Effect on Gaze Data Visualization at Different Abstraction Levels

“…On the other hand, scanpath visualization is an analytical technique that reveals the eye movements with fixation and saccade [ 32 , 33 , 34 , 35 ]. The scanpath visualization is adopted to investigate eye movement patterns in various domains [ 36 , 37 ]. Burch et al [ 36 ] analyze gaze trajectories of observers looking at traditional, orthogonal, and radial layouts diagrams.…”

“…Burch et al [ 36 ] analyze gaze trajectories of observers looking at traditional, orthogonal, and radial layouts diagrams. Eraslan et al [ 37 ] analyze the scanpaths to improve the usability of web pages. The scanpath visualization also shows various information in gaze data with node size, link thickness, and colors of nodes and links in addition to the movement feature [ 38 , 39 , 40 ].…”

Representative Scanpath Identification for Group Viewing Pattern Analysis

“…However, to get the group viewing pattern, we need to take into account all individual scanpaths rather than focus on a single one, like the identified scanpath in Figure 1(b), which we call representative scanpath. The surge of interest in dynamic vis-ual attention gives rise to various methods for representative scanpaths identification, most of which either stem from sequence mining algorithms or target a specific category of visual stimuli such as web pages (Eraslan, Yesilada & Harper, 2014, 2016a, 2016b, 2016c, 2017a, 2017b. So they have limitations when applied to analyze scanpaths.…”

Scan path visualization and comparison using visual aggregation techniques

“…Fixation patterns can be transformed into transitions between meaningful semantically different AOIs that can be analyzed using graphs, trees, or matrices (Blascheck et al, 2016). The sequences of annotated fixations can be further compared using string edit metrics (Levenstein, 1966;Le Meur & Baccino, 2013;Eraslan et al, 2015), or represented as a dotplot to discover scanpath patterns using linear regression and hierarchical clustering (Goldberg & Helfman, 2010a). The string-based scanpath comparison can also be performed without an a priori AOI definition by regrouping fixations into clusters automatically (Duchowski et al, 2010;Santella & De Carlo, 2004).…”