Continuous Prediction of Web User Visual Attention on Short Span Windows Based on Gaze Data Analytics

Abstract

Understanding users’ visual attention on websites is paramount to enhance the browsing experience, such as providing emergent information or dynamically adapting Web interfaces. Existing approaches to accomplish these challenges are generally based on the computation of salience maps of static Web interfaces, while websites increasingly become more dynamic and interactive. This paper proposes a method and provides a proof-of-concept to predict user’s visual attention on specific regions of a website with dynamic components. This method predicts the regions of a user’s visual attention without requiring a constant recording of the current layout of the website, but rather by knowing the structure it presented in a past period. To address this challenge, the concept of visit intention is introduced in this paper, defined as the probability that a user, while browsing, will fixate their gaze on a specific region of the website in the next period. Our approach uses the gaze patterns of a population that browsed a specific website, captured via an eye-tracker device, to aid personalized prediction models built with individual visual kinetics features. We show experimentally that it is possible to conduct such a prediction through multilabel classification models using a small number of users, obtaining an average area under curve of 84.3%, and an average accuracy of 79%. Furthermore, the user’s visual kinetics features are consistently selected in every set of a cross-validation evaluation.