Exploring the Utility of Saccade Length in Eye Tracking on Digital Library Experiences

With the increasing use of eye tracking and qualitative measures to evaluate user experience of digital websites combined with a need to retain user interest in an age of chatbots, we present a re-examination of a study comparing the user experiences on two digital library homepages using novel measures derived from saccade length (i.e., the distance a user’s gaze travels across a page). Despite such measures being unsupported by common eye tracking software, we find that saccade-based measures correlate positively with several emotions and that they can be used to indicate complex interfaces that may increase user uncertainty.