How Users View Web Pages: An Exploration of Cognitive and Perceptual Mechanisms

Abstract

This chapter presents the basic cognitive and perceptual attentional mechanisms that affect how users view web pages and the methods used to measure this attention. It describes the groundbreaking work of Faraday (2000), who proposed a visual scanning model of web pages based on salient visual elements and summarizes data from eye tracking techniques that reveal the strengths and weaknesses of the Faraday model. The primary goal of the chapter is to help the reader gain an understanding of what visual elements on a web page draw a user’s attention, how that knowledge can be collected, and how it can be applied to the design of useful and usable web sites.