Mobile Interface Attentional Priority Model

Abstract

Mobile devices are now the most popular computing technology for accessing the Internet. This has resulted in designers devoting more of their time to improving users’ mobile experiences. This can be achieved in part by helping users find content quickly and easily. Understanding what supports or harms a user’s visual search is key to creating displays that meet usability efficiency requirements. Broadly, searches are guided by a combination of visual salience and previous experiences. We recommend revealing these influences by employing a computational saliency model and by employing our mobile spatial convention map. The research presented extends the previous attentional priority (AP) modeling work, from web pages to mobile interfaces. Notably, we reveal that users typically search a mobile web page by using a “railroad-like” viewing pattern rather than the “F” pattern that is typically described in web page research. Also, we propose a mobile web page-specific attentional priority (AP) model. The AP model combines our experience-based spatial convention map with a saliency model map. We examined the predictive performance of a saliency model, compared to the mobile-specific convention map. It was discovered that the convention map better predicted the initial deployment of attention, and the saliency map better accounted for later selection.