Characterizing web user visual gaze patterns: A graph theory inspired approach

Abstract

We propose a graph-based analysis framework to study the dynamics of visual gaze from web users. Our goal is to extract the main characteristics of the information foraging process from an attention-centric perspective. Our approach consists of modeling web objects, such as images and paragraphs, as nodes. The visual transitions are represented as edges. With the resulting graphs, several standard metrics were computed. We performed an initial empirical study with 23 subjects. The visual activity was captured using an eye tracking device. The results suggest that a graph based analysis can capture in a reliable way the dynamics of user behavior and the identification of salient objects within a web site. © 2014 Springer International Publishing.