Web usability is a crucial feature of a website, allowing users to easily find information in a short time. Eye tracking data registered during the execution of tasks allow to measure web usability in a more objective way compared to questionnaires. In this work, we evaluated the web usability of the website of the University of Cagliari through the analysis of eye tracking data with qualitative and quantitative methods. Performances of two groups of students (i.e., high school and university students) across 10 different tasks were compared in terms of time to completion, number of fixations and difficulty ratio. Transitions between different areas of interest (AOI) were analyzed in the two groups using Markov chain. For the majority of tasks, we did not observe significant differences in the performances of the two groups, suggesting that the information needed to complete the tasks could easily be retrieved by students with little previous experience in using the website. For a specific task, high school students showed a worse performance based on the number of fixations and a different Markov chain stationary distribution compared to university students. These results allowed to highlight elements of the pages that can be modified to improve web usability.

中文翻译：

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使用眼动追踪数据分析大学网站的网络可用性的马尔可夫链

网络可用性是网站的一个重要特征，它允许用户在短时间内轻松找到信息。与问卷相比，在任务执行期间记录的眼动追踪数据允许以更客观的方式衡量网络可用性。在这项工作中，我们通过使用定性和定量方法分析眼动追踪数据来评估卡利亚里大学网站的网络可用性。比较两组学生（即高中生和大学生）在完成 10 项不同任务的时间、注视次数和难度比方面的表现。使用马尔可夫链分析两组中不同兴趣区域 (AOI) 之间的转换。对于大多数任务，我们没有观察到两组的表现有显着差异，这表明以前几乎没有使用该网站的经验的学生可以轻松检索完成任务所需的信息。对于特定任务，与大学生相比，高中生在注视次数和不同的马尔可夫链平稳分布方面表现出更差的表现。这些结果允许突出显示可以修改以提高 Web 可用性的页面元素。