Application of Eye Tracking Technology in Naturalistic Usability Assessment of an Academic Library Website

The current research assesses the usability of an academic library website. This approach is based on visualization of visual attention and learnability of the website. Ten freshmen students, as novice users, and three librarians, as expert users, participated in this research. Seventeen tasks were developed; these tasks were informational searches, some completed up to two or three times in order to assess the learning curves of participants. The librarians’ task times were treated as the benchmark “golden times” that a novice user would approach with experience. An eye tracker was used to assess usability. It was of particular interest to (1) identify the areas of the library website that are not clear to novice users and (2) to measure the learning curve of various informational searches. The results of this research indicated how quickly novice users learned tasks and which areas of the library webpages attract more attention.

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