Following the Eye-Tracking Evidence: Established Web-Search Assumptions Fail in Carousel Interfaces

TL;DR

This study investigates user behavior in carousel interfaces, revealing that traditional web search assumptions like the F-pattern and examination hypothesis do not apply, highlighting the need for new models.

Contribution

It provides empirical evidence that established web search behavioral assumptions fail in carousel interfaces, challenging current modeling approaches.

Findings

F-pattern applies only to vertical examination, not horizontal swiping

Examination follows an L-pattern conditioned on clicks, unique to carousels

Users ignore headings and focus directly on content items

Abstract

Carousel interfaces have been the de-facto standard for streaming media services for over a decade. Yet, there has been very little research into user behavior with such interfaces, which thus remains poorly understood. Due to this lack of empirical research, previous work has assumed that behaviors established in single-list web-search interfaces, such as the F-pattern and the examination hypothesis, also apply to carousel interfaces, for instance when designing click models or evaluation metrics. We analyze a recently-released interaction and examination dataset resulting from an eye-tracking study performed on carousel interfaces to verify whether these assumptions actually hold. We find that (i)~the F-pattern holds only for vertical examination and not for horizontal swiping; additionally, we discover that, when conditioned on a click, user examination follows an L-pattern unique to carousel interfaces; (ii)~click-through-rates conditioned on examination indicate that the well-known examination hypothesis does not hold in carousel interfaces; and (iii)~contrary to the assumptions of previous work, users generally ignore carousel headings and focus directly on the content items. Our findings show that many user behavior assumptions, especially concerning examination patterns, do not transfer from web search interfaces to carousel recommendation settings. Our work shows that the field lacks a reliable foundation on which to build models of user behavior with these interfaces. Consequently, a re-evaluation of existing metrics and click models for carousel interfaces may be warranted.