The User Interface Elements and Their Impact on Website Usage

The purpose of this study was to identify those elements of user interface (i.e. navigation, structure, graphic, and content), in which users are interested since they are either visually familiar or new to themand could remain in their long term memory. Therefore, in this study, users' interaction with elements of website interfaces was investigated through information processing theorybased on the eye-mind hypothesis with considering their capabilities (i.e. learning style, information and computer literacy).

This research was carried out through an applicatory & explanatory method. The research population consisted of postgraduate students of Ferdowsi University of Mashhad. For data gathering, interactive sessions using eye tracker was used. The four elements i.e. navigation, structure, graphics, and content of the Wikipedia's website were considered as the testbed and a set of tasks were defined and participants were asked to perform them, carrying these tasks out formed the interactive sessions. Descriptive and inferential statistics were applied to analyze the data. In the descriptive section, frequency, percent, central tendency measures such as mean and dispersion indices such as standard deviation were used. As for the inferential secion, appropriate statistical measures were used to test the null hypothese; among them we can mention the multivariate two factor analysis of covariance, single variable two factors of covariance analysis and repeated measurement.

The results show that among the studied elements, the navinavigations the highest number of subjects' fixation count, and graphics, content and structure occupy the next ranks respectively. Maximum and minimum fixtation count for navigation is 0.87 and for structure is 0.34. the longest participants’ fixation duration was related to navigation element, and after that graphics, structure and content respectively. Maximum fixtation duration is for navigation (0.81) and minimum fixation duration is attributed to the content element (0.42).

Changing in interface design paradigms caused users pay little attention to content elements and become more interested in visual elements instead. By examining the eye movements of the users in this research, it is now evident that the user interface elements have impact on the users' eye movements. During the process of interaction, the users' eye movements changed from attending general elements to attending more complex ones.The results of this study is useful for user interface designers to design better user interface for stable, consistent and deep interaction with users which helps better information processing. So, based on looking behavior (through users’ eye tracking) and obtaining information regarding visited webpage, designers can get essential knowledge for specifying necessary main elements and subsidiary components in web page designing and organizing\layouting them.