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Masters Thesis

Issues of Saliency and Recognition in the Search for Web Page Bookmarks

Last updated: 7 April, 2005

About this work

I wrote this thesis in 2003 as part of the Masters by Research in Design and Evaluation of Advanced Interactive Systems at Lancaster University.

It describes the effect of bookmark naming on bookmark recognition. The purpose was to provide empirically-determined guidelines for web producers on how to title pages in order to optimise the recognition of bookmarks by users, and to increase the rate of revisitation as a result.

I presented an edited version of the thesis as a conference paper at HCI 2004, a major conference in human-computer interaction.

Contents

View the whole thesis on one page (907k)

• > Abstract
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Purpose of the Experiment
• 3. Eye Movements
• 4. The Experiment
• 5. Data Processing
• 6. Results
• 7. Discussion
• 8. Conclusion
• Acknowledgements
• References
• Appendix A - Test websites and their corresponding bookmark text
• Appendix B - Screenshots of test websites
• Appendix C - A set of typical distractor bookmarks
• Appendix D - Questionnaire
• Appendix E - Specimen file of raw eye movement data
• Appendix F - Specimen areas of interest file

Abstract

Bookmarks are a useful way for people to return to web pages they visited previously, but it can be difficult to find a specific link when the bookmark collection grows too large. Graphical aids do exist to make bookmarks 'stand out', such as icons and thumbnails, but these are not universally applied. This study attempts to find the optimum way of writing bookmarks so that they can be recognised more effectively in a visual search of the bookmark menu when no graphical aids are available.

30 post-graduate students were presented with a series of news websites followed each time by a menu of bookmarks. Their task was to find the bookmark they thought corresponded to the website they had just seen. The structure of the bookmark was manipulated (top-down or bottom-up information structures) as well as the number of informational cues (one, two or three). The time taken to find each bookmark was measured and eye movement data was gathered to provide a deeper understanding of the participants' visual search behaviour and related cognitive processing.

The number of cues on display in a bookmark was a significant factor in recognition time, where two cues were found to be necessary for optimal recognition, one cue was found to be highly sub-optimal and a third cue added no recognition value at all. However, top-down and bottom-up bookmark structures were found to be equally salient.

Keywords

Bookmarks, eye-tracking, information salience, visual search, World Wide Web

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