Mouse movement during relevance judging: implications for determining user attention

Several researchers have found that a user's mouse position gives an indication of the user's gaze during web search and other tasks. As part of a user study that involved relevance judging of document summaries and full documents, we recorded users' mouse movements. We found that in a large number of cases, the users did nothing more with their mouse than move it to the buttons used for recording the relevance decision. In addition, we found that different search topics can result in large differences in the amount of mouse movement that is indicative of user attention. For simple reading tasks, such as short document summaries, mouse-tracking does not appear to be an effective means of discerning user attention. While more complex tasks may allow mouse movements to provide information regarding user attention, on average, indications of user attention existed in only 59% of the relevance judgments made for full documents.