The Eyes' View of Multimedia News Features
Now that we're in the broadband-Internet era, news websites can safely go beyond text and static images -- and many routinely do. Audio-narrated slide shows, video, interactive animated info-graphics ... you'll find those and more while surfing for news these days.

The Eyetrack III researchers decided to take a through-the-eyes look at what people see and how they behave when they encounter multimedia news features. Our testing wasn't comprehensive; rather, it represents the beginning of a more serious look at how to design multimedia editorial content so that viewers best find and comprehend the information contained.

For this multimedia section of Eyetrack III, we conducted two exercises:

Multimedia Recall & Comprehension

We took two multimedia features (from NYTimes.com) and created text-only versions. Each of our testers viewed one multimedia feature and one text feature on different subjects, then we asked follow-up questions to measure their recall of facts presented in the features. We compared their performance. And we tracked their eyes throughout the test, so we could match comprehension with that data to determine whether they looked at the part of the page containing the answer. story>

Observations on Multimedia News Features

Next, we gave our test subjects a list of real-world multimedia news features and 10 minutes to view whatever interested them. The eyetracker rolled as we observed how they interacted with the features they chose to view. This informal test revealed interesting observations and gave us clues about what to test for in future multimedia-content eyetracking studies. story>