Impact of information overload for visual search on Web pages: An eye-tracking study

A large number of previous studies have demonstrated that visual search on Web pages is impacted by many factors, such as colors, fonts, information forms and information layout. However, there are few studies about the effect of information quantity for visual search on Web pages. To investigate this issue, we designed two experiments using eye-tracking. The information quantity of Web pages in Experiment 2 was the double of that in Experiment 1. Results show that the search time in Experiment 2 is significantly longer than that in Experiment 1. From the heat maps of Experiment 2, most of the fixations were on the upper area of Web pages, especially on the upper half. Further analysis indicates that in Experiment 2, both of the fixation duration and fixation count on the upper half of Web pages are significantly larger than that on the lower half. These results suggest that the increase of information quantity on Web pages reduces the users' visual search efficiency and this is the impact of information overload on Web pages. The reason for this effect is that the range of the users' vision is limited and they pay more attention to the upper area of Web page, especially the upper half.