Effects of Text Saliency on Eye Movements while Browsing a Web Portal

This study investigates the eye movement patterns of users viewing a portal web page. Previous research has shown that users scan a portal page in a top-to-bottom manner by row. In this study, the saliency of one of the portal channel titles was manipulated to see what impact this would have on the users ’ scan pattern. The saliency of the channel title was manipulated in two different page locations by modifying the color the text. Results indicate that channel location was found to be a stronger determinant of where users fixate and that the saliency of the channel title is a secondary determinant. Overall, users first fixated the portal page in the top, center channel regardless of the channel title color. Subsequent eye movements appear to be impacted by the salient title, but only when it was located on the left side of the page. Implications of these results to portal webpage design are discussed. The use of web-based portals has become more prevalent in recent years given the extensive use of websites like Yahoo.com and iGoogle.com and a shift toward centralizing enterprise information into corporate intranet sites. Generally, web portals are classified into two groups: public and private portals. Public portals like iGoogle offer services like e-mail, weather, news, games, etc. to all interne