The visual properties of a design contribute to the formation of regions with differing amounts of uniqueness, or salience, producing an initial stimulus-driven attentional bias. The colocation of salient regions and critical information should be maximized as this increases the interface's usability by decreasing search times. The determination of salient locations, however, is often difficult. In web page design, eye tracking has traditionally been used to measure where users attend, therefore indicating the salient regions. But, eye tracking as a descriptive technique has many known costs. We propose two alternative methods to eye tracking that can be used to predict which regions of a web page will draw users' stimulusdriven attention: interest point recording and saliency model predictions.Through an empirical investigation we show that the predictions of both methods correlate with the locations fixated by a separate group of participants, and thus these methods are effective alternatives to eye tracking during formative design testing.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.