Views and Clicks in Digital Libraries - A Comparative Usability Analysis of Eye and Mouse Tracking Data

In this study, eye tracking and mouse tracking data collected from two Swiss digital library web sites are compared, with respect to their specific areas of interest in order to answer two questions: Firstly, to know, how far the perception of the corresponding areas of interests differed from site to site and how far general recommendations can be inferred from this comparison. Secondly, the dispersion on the gaze and the mouse click plots were compared with the results of the two methods with each other to see if one method can be replaced by each other or if both methods should rather be considered as complementary. The results show that especially the choice of color and the use of contrast strongly influence gazes and clicks and that some areas of interest mainly attract views, but not clicks and vice versa, which leads to a complementary distribution pattern, and makes the question of replacing one method by the other obsolete.