Information seeking behaviour at Google: eye-tracking research

Anne Aula and Kerry Rodden have just published a posting on the Official Google Blog summarising some eye-tracking research they have been conducting on Google's 'Universal Search'. Both are active in information seeking behaviour and human-computer interaction research at Google and are well published within the related literature (e.g. JASIST, IPM, SIGIR, CHI, etc.).

The motivation behind their research was to evaluate the effect incorporation of thumbnail images and video within a research set has on user information seeking behaviour. Previous information retrieval eye-tracking research indicates that users scan results in order, scanning down their results until they reach a (potentially) relevant result, or until they decide to refine their search query or abandon the search. Aula and Rodden were concerned that the inclusion of thumbnail images might distract the "well-established order of result evaluation". Some comparative evaluation was therefore order of the day.

"We ran a series of eye-tracking studies where we compared how users scan the search results pages with and without thumbnail images. Our studies showed that the thumbnails did not strongly affect the order of scanning the results and seemed to make it easier for the participants to find the result they wanted."

A good finding for Google, of course; but most astonishing is the eye-tracking data. The speed with which users scanned result sets and the number of points on the interface they scanned was incredible. View the 'real time' clip below. A dot increasing in size denotes the length of time a user spent pausing at that specific point in the interface or result set. Some other interesting discoveries were made – the full posting is essential reading.