Attention Modeling for Web Page Users

We are currently living in what can arguably be called the "information age". One of the main characteristics of the age is to allow individuals to have instant access to information. Such information can be multi-faceted ranging from latest stock-market data to information related to the health-care facilities available in one's locality. The technology that emerged over time to be one of the primary sources for the individuals to access information is the World Wide Web (WWW). The two major actors in the WWW-based information dissemination process are (a) the information provider and (b) the information user. The "interface" between these two is a "webpage" displayed on a web browser such as Mozilla Firefox, Internet Explorer etc. Evidently, it is of utmost importance that the information provider design the webpage in a way such that the information user finds it easy to locate the information; in other words, a "usable" interface. If a webpage is badly designed, the user may lose interest in locating information contained in the web page. Consequently, the very objective of an information provider to put up web pages will be lost. This may have both economic as well as social consequence. For example, if the user loses interest in viewing the home page of a company, the company may be losing potential customers in spite of having good products. On the other hand, if the user is not interested to view a government web page containing information about various schemes available for the rural people (an e-governance activity), the loser will be the intended segment (rural population) of the society. Keeping this in mind, we aim to model web page usability in terms of "visibility". Visibility is a measure of attention the user is expected to give to particular object/regions on the web page. The visibility model will rank different objects/regions on the page in terms of their visibility to a user. From this ranking, a designer can find out if the most important information on the webpage has the highest visibility. It is also envisaged to produce a visual output of the web page, where objects/regions are marked with different colors according to their visibility. The visual output is expected to make the job of the designer easier. At present, web pages are designed using either of the several available tools such as Microsoft FrontPage, Microsoft Publisher, Dream Weaver etc., none of which checks for the usability of the designed page. A semi-automatic design process can be envisaged as consisting of a tool to check automatically the source program of a web page (output of the existing tools) for any potential visibility problems. The system then draws the designer's attention to these problems in a usable form, so that the designer can understand and rectify the problems.