Clutter or content?

Abstract

The influence of "on-screen enhancements" such as headline bars and bottom-of-the-screen crawlers on viewing of TV was tested using television news stories. Eye-movement data were recorded for participants' viewings of three news stories in three design levels: a standard screen, a screen with crawler; and a screen with headline bar and crawler. The influence of screen design on distribution of fixations was measured in a 3x3 MANOVA (screen design x story topic) with the ratios of fixation time in defined areas of interest (AOIs) to overall story length as dependent variables. The influence of screen design on the sequential resemblance of eye-path sequences was examined with a string-edit method; multidimensional scaling and cluster analysis were used to group sequences according to their intersequence resemblances as measured by Levenshtein distance. The influence of screen design on processing of story content was measured by story content recall.Results indicated screen design influenced distribution of fixation time across AOIs. Fixation sequence length was unrelated to screen design but was a strong influence on sequence resemblances; however, fixations in the headline and crawler AOIs also contributed to eye-path groupings, Screen design's influence on story content recall was limited to enhanced recall of key story points when headlines related to those points were present, although recall for other story points diminished.