In Search of Salience: A Response-time and Eye-movement Analysis of Bookmark Recognition

Bookmarks are a valuable webpage-revisitation technique, but it is often difficult to find desired items in extensive bookmark collections. This experiment used response-time measures and eye-movement tracking to investigate how different information structures within bookmarks influence their salience and recognisability. Participants were presented with a series of news websites. The task following presentation of each site was to find the bookmark indexing the previously-seen page as quickly as possible. The Informational Structure of bookmarks was manipulated (top-down vs. bottom-up verbal organisations), together with the Number of Informational Cues present (one, two or three). Only this latter factor affected gross search times: Two cues were optimal, one cue was highly sub-optimal. However, more detailed eye-movement analyses of fixation behaviour on target items revealed interactive effects of both experimental factors, suggesting that the efficacy of bookmark recognition is crucially dependent on having an optimal combination of information quantity and information organisation.