Interesting user research: a comparison of eye movement among Chinese, American and Korean users

Recently, the Chinese and Korean researchers conducted a cross-cultural study of cognitive style (cognitive style) and web-page perception (webpage perception), and the findings of the study were quite interesting, with a total of 27 people in the United States and South Korea. The experiment is to allow the user to browse (without any clicks) following this test page modeled after Yahoo (according to the user's nationality using the corresponding language version of the page), the eye movement will be recorded in real time, the test process is 30 seconds.

Figure 1: Test Page The researcher divides the page into 9 areas of interest (AOI, area of interests).

Figure 2: The area of Interest (AOI) from the following figure "the first 25 seconds of user access AOI sum" can be seen, the Korean user's eyes have been beating around the entire page. They jump more and more in every area than the other two groups. In the first 15 seconds, users in the US and China had similar eye movements, and in the first 10 seconds, Chinese users had a slightly higher AOI activity than their American users, but were quickly ahead of the obvious. After 15 seconds, U.S. users ' AOI growth rate is lower than that of Chinese users, indicating that American eye activity begins to stabilize and begins to focus on a particular page.

The following figure is "sum of time per Aoi". Note that the length of stay reflects the importance of the area to the user. The area 2 (see Figure 2) in the middle of the page header is particularly important and attracts the most lasting attention of the three users. Overall, American users were significantly more focused on regions 1, 2 and 5 than in the other two groups. Chinese users have focused more attention on regions 6, 7, 8 and 9.

Look again at the eye movement results (from top to bottom in order from the middle, the United States, Korea). The green dots represent the beginning of the eye activity, and the red represents the end.

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Chinese User Eye Movement chart

American User Eye Movement chart.

Korean user eye movement according to the eye movement result, the researcher has made the analysis from two aspects:

Where sequential Reading: The eye with the area block in turn to browse

Circular Scan: Eye scan Path is close to drawing round clockwise.

Back and Forth Scan: The eyes are scanned between the contents, and an area is repeatedly watched over a short period of time.

Scan only: The user only scanned the page, and did not focus on an area, that is, eye movement is very frequent.

Focus on title: The user's attention is placed relatively more on the title.

Navigation Reading: Users focus more on the navigation bar and spend some time navigating the content

This shows that the Chinese and Korean users are more likely to scan, ring the way to read the Web page. At the same time, the Chinese and Korean users prefer to travel between the various content areas, indicating that they read more casually. On the contrary, American users pay more attention to detail and rarely take a glance at it. The following figure illustrates the eye movement from another angle.

"0" Shape: eye-moving path similar to drawing 0

"5" Shape: The eye-moving path is similar to drawing 5. (That is, the eyes are accessed by this: 2, 5, 6, 9, 8, 7 regions).

"N" Shape: Look at a column and see another column.

"Z" Shape: the eyes sweep through each line in turn.

"X" Shape: The eyes are scanned diagonally, jumping randomly. It can be seen that most Chinese and Korean people use 0-style browsing, while Americans are more than 5-style browsing. That is to say, the Chinese and Korean users will look at a page as a whole, while most Americans tend to navigate from the center to the periphery.

Finally, the researcher puts forward some design suggestions. For Chinese and Korean users who adopt the holistic way of thinking (holistic thinkers), they tend to scan the page as a whole, and in a non-linear way, the content arrangement can be more flexible. For American users who use analytical thinking (analytic thinkers), the layout of the page is very clear, each information area must be different from the other characteristics, navigation is also particularly important.

Article Source: 365ucd.com