The Relevance of Eye-Tracking to Understand Users’ Practices and Content Interpretation in Tourism-Related Online Navigation

Abstract

This chapter presents and discusses the implications of current approaches to understand practices of users accessing tourism-related online content, especially when it comes to their understanding and interpretation of main contents and sentiments being expressed in the resources they navigate. The Eye-Tracking technique has been implemented to reach such goal, integrating results from previous research conducted by the authors (Marchiori and Cantoni, Information and communication technologies in tourism 2015, Springer, Cham; Cantoni et al., Design, user experience, and usability: understanding users and contexts, Springer, Cham, 2017). The eye-tracking technique is used to explore the match between users’ actual navigation on webpages and their interpretation of the topics covered by such online resources. Results suggest that a multisource approach/data triangulation helps to reduce possible biases that may occur if only one approach is adopted both in online content analysis as well as in online consumer behavior investigation.