Cultural differences on seeking information: an eye tracking study

Document Type

Article

Source of Publication

ACM SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI 2013)

Publication Date

2013

Abstract

The main goal of this research is to investigate how people with different cultural background differ in their interaction style and visual behavior on search engine results pages (SERP), more specifically between groups from the Middle Eastern region vs. Western Europe. We conducted a controlled eye-tracking experiment to explore and evaluate the visual behavior of Arabs and Spaniard users when scanning through the first page of the search results in Google. Big differences can be observed in the 4 aspects studied: U.A.E. participants stayed on the SERPs for longer, they read more results and they read each snippet in a more complete way than Spaniards. In Spain, people tended to scan the SERP, reading less text on each snippet, and choose a result among the first top ranked ones without hardly seeing those in bottom positions.

Disciplines

Computer Sciences

Keywords

Search engines, Cultural differences, Eye tracking, Visual behavior, User experience

Indexed in Scopus

no

Open Access

yes

Open Access Type

Green: A manuscript of this publication is openly available in a repository

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