Visualizing Web Users’ Attention to Text with Selection Heatmaps

Abstract

Web analytics tools provide useful information about the interaction of users with websites, and particularly, on what captures the attention of web visitors on websites. User attention to areas of web pages can be visualized using heatmaps. Two types of attention indicators are commonly used in web analytics heatmaps: visibility duration of page sections in the browser’s viewport and mouse activity on areas and elements of web pages. This work introduces a new type of user attention heatmap, which visualizes the frequency of text selection operations on websites. Selection is the first step in the process of copying text to the clipboard, but it is also used to highlight important points while reading, similarly to highlighting words on a notebook with a marker pen. As demonstrated and discussed in this paper, selection heatmaps provide interesting perspectives on user attention to paragraphs, sentences, and words on websites, and this could be useful in web analytics.