Cursor tracking data contains information about website visitors which may provide new ways to understand visitors and their needs. This paper presents an Amazon Mechanical Turk study where participants were tracked as they used modified variants of the Wikipedia and BBC News websites. Participants were asked to complete reading and information-finding tasks. The results showed that it was possible to differentiate between users reading content and users looking for information based on cursor data. The effects of website aesthetics, user interest and cursor hardware were also analysed which showed it was possible to identify hardware from cursor data, but no relationship between cursor data and engagement was found. The implications of these results, from the impact on web analytics to the design of experiments to assess user engagement, are discussed.
翻译:光标跟踪数据包含关于网站访问者的信息,这些访问者可以提供了解访问者及其需求的新方式。本文介绍了亚马逊机械土耳其研究,与会者在这项研究中使用了Wikipedia和BBC News网站的变异版本来跟踪他们。与会者被要求完成阅读和信息调查任务。结果显示,可以区分阅读内容的用户和根据光标数据寻找信息的用户。还分析了网站审美学、用户兴趣和光标硬件的影响,表明有可能从光标数据中识别硬件,但光标数据与参与之间没有发现任何关系。讨论了这些结果的影响,包括网络分析对评估用户参与的实验设计的影响。