Enterprise software pages, routinely used to conduct a variety of business-relevant tasks, must be clear and nonconfusing to experienced end users. A study was conducted to consider the impact of several page design factors (background gradient, font, and font size) on perceived ratings of page clarity, completion time, emotional valence (EV) from video, and several eye-tracking parameters. Twenty professional managers each completed 25 tasks on enterprise web pages designed with specific combinations of these factors. Highly rated pages had Tahoma and Larger fonts, compared to Calibri and Smaller fonts. The Gradient background did not influence ratings but did increase the search area and completion time. Although EV was not a sensitive measure across tasks, it was influenced by font differences in the first few seconds of page presentation. Overall, the use of background gradient was not supported, but both Tahoma and Larger fonts were supported for these enterprise pages.

Eye tracking scanpaths contain information about how people see, but traditional tangled, overlapping scanpath representations provide little insight about scanning strategies. The present work describes and extends several compact visual scanpath representations that can provide additional insight about individual and aggregate/multiple scanning strategies. Three categories of representations are introduced: (1) Scaled traces are small images of scanpaths as connected saccades, allowing the comparison of relative fixation densities and distributions of saccades. (2) Time expansions, substituting ordinal position for either the scanpath's x or y-coordinates, can uncover otherwise subtle horizontal or vertical reversals in visual scanning. (3) Radial plots represent scanpaths as a set of radial arms about an origin, with each arm representing saccade counts or lengths within a binned set of absolute or relative angles. Radial plots can convey useful shape characteristics of scanpaths, and can provide a basis for new metrics. Nine different prototype scanning strategies were represented by these plots, then heuristics were developed to classify the major strategies. The heuristics were subsequently applied to real scanpath data, to identify strategy trends. Future work will further automate the identification of scanning strategies to provide researchers with a tool to uncover and diagnose scanning-related challenges.

Eye tracking specialists often need to understand and represent aggregate scanning strategies, but methods to identify similar scanpaths and aggregate multiple scanpaths have been elusive. A new method is proposed here to identify scanning strategies by aggregating groups of matching scanpaths automatically. A dataset of scanpaths is first converted to sequences of viewed area names, which are then represented in a dotplot. Matching sequences in the dotplot are found with linear regressions, and then used to cluster the scanpaths hierarchically. Aggregate scanning strategies are generated for each cluster and presented in an interactive dendrogram. While the clustering and aggregation method works in a bottom-up fashion, based on pair-wise matches, a top-down extension is also described, in which a scanning strategy is first input by cursor gesture, then matched against the dataset. The ability to discover both bottom-up and top-down strategy matches provides a powerful tool for scanpath analysis, and for understanding group scanning strategies.

Liquid layout of web browser elements enables enterprise applications to adapt to larger windows on larger displays, but guidelines are needed to define layout rules for widescreen page content. The present study considers the impact of relative portlet distance and orientation in enterprise-type tasks. Eighteen analysts completed tasks in which critical information was located in two portlets separated by defined distances and orientations. Analysis of completion times, assists, errors, and subjective scales revealed a significant advantage for wider, horizontal information layouts over narrower, vertical layouts. The difference persisted, even when accounting for the influence of vertical scrolling. Horizontal layout in these dashboard-style tasks had a 5%-25% time savings over vertical layout, as separation distances increased to 2000 pixels. Differences in horizontal and vertical eye movement accuracy and velocity could account for these results. Widescreen design guidelines should include a preference for horizontal layout as horizontal screen distances increase.

An eye tracking study was conducted to evaluate specific design features for a prototype web portal application. This software serves independent web content through separate, rectangular, user-modifiable portlets on a web page. Each of seven participants navigated across multiple web pages while conducting six specific tasks, such as removing a link from a portlet. Specific experimental questions included (1) whether eye tracking-derived parameters were related to page sequence or user actions preceding page visits, (2) whether users were biased to traveling vertically or horizontally while viewing a web page, and (3) whether specific sub-features of portlets were visited in any particular order. Participants required 2-15 screens, and from 7-360+ seconds to complete each task. Based on analysis of screen sequences, there was little evidence that search became more directed as screen sequence increased. Navigation among portlets, when at least two columns exist, was biased towards horizontal search (across columns) as opposed to vertical search (within column). Within a portlet, the header bar was not reliably visited prior to the portlet's body, evidence that header bars are not reliably used for navigation cues. Initial design recommendations emphasized the need to place critical portlets on the left and top of the web portal area, and that related portlets do not need to appear in the same column. Further experimental replications are recommended to generalize these results to other applications.

The process of fixation identification—separating and labeling fixations and saccades in eye-tracking protocols—is an essential part of eye-movement data analysis and can have a dramatic impact on higher-level analyses. However, algorithms for performing fixation identification are often described informally and rarely compared in a meaningful way. In this paper we propose a taxonomy of fixation identification algorithms that classifies algorithms in terms of how they utilize spatial and temporal information in eye-tracking protocols. Using this taxonomy, we describe five algorithms that are representative of different classes in the taxonomy and are based on commonly employed techniques. We then evaluate and compare these algorithms with respect to a number of qualitative characteristics. The results of these comparisons offer interesting implications for the use of the various algorithms in future work.