Exploring Blog Spaces: A Study of Blog Reading Experiences using Dynamic Contextual Displays

In this paper we report on an eye-tracking experiment conducted with 60 participants to gain an understanding of how people interact with blog environments. We compared a standard blog interface with a novel contextual blog interface, which dynamically adjusts its contextual navigation to a selected article. We measured task performance and interaction behaviour for explorative tasks and goal-oriented search tasks. We further collected subjective feedback to evaluate user preferences. We found that participants using the contextual blog interface completed search tasks 19% faster and made 80% fewer errors. Moreover, participants using the contextual blog interface interacted more with the provided information during the exploration tasks. We did not find significant differences in user preference overall between both blog interfaces. However, a more detailed analysis of our results suggests significant demographic differences for performance, behavioural and subjective measures.