Identifying Distractors for People with Computer Anxiety Based on Mouse Fixations

Abstract Computer anxiety (CA) can be defined as fear and worries that someone may feel when using computers. Thus, people with CA may face problems when using computers at home, at work or for study purposes, resulting in multiple forms of barriers even before the actual interaction with computers. In this context, the purpose of this research is to identify user interface elements impacting task performance (i.e. distractors) for people with CA, using mouse fixation analysis as a proxy for eye gaze data. The study explores the relationship of mouse and eye gaze data collected with the help of 39 older adults interacting with a website. Results show that it is possible to identify UI elements acting as distractors (e.g. carousel, top menu) as well as those with which people with CA faced problems (e.g. side menu, search box, map), based on mouse fixations. Moreover, statistical differences show that the number of mouse fixations in navigation, content and distractors is different for different levels of CA. Furthermore, differences were found between CA groups regarding mouse and eye fixations, indicating that participants with higher CA levels had difficulty differentiating which areas of interest they should interact with using mouse. From the results, one expects that personalized systems could use the proposed approach to identify UI elements acting as distractors using mouse data and then simplify UIs based on different levels of CA.