Directions and Speeds of Mouse Movements on a Website and Reading Patterns: A Web Usage Mining Case Study

Mouse activity is known as an important indicator of user attention and interest on a web page. Many modern commercial web analytics services record and report mouse activity of users on websites. The position of the mouse cursor on the screen is the main source of information, as studies show a correlation between the cursor position during mouse activity and the user's eye gaze. This study focuses on mouse movement directions and speeds, and what they indicate, rather than on the mouse cursor position. Statistical analysis of mouse movements on a technical-educational website, which was selected for this study, sheds light on several interesting patterns. For example, most mouse movements in the examined usage data are either approximately horizontal or approximately vertical, horizontal mouse movements are more frequent than vertical mouse movements, and horizontal movements to the left and to the right are not equivalent in terms of moving time and speed. As this study shows, these statistical findings are related to the reading patterns and behaviors of web users. Associating mouse movements with text reading may potentially highlight content that most users tend to skip, and therefore, might not interest the website audience, and content that many readers read more than once or slowly, meaning it is possibly unclear. This could be useful in locating issues in textual content, in websites in general, and especially in online learning and educational technology applications.