Applying On-Line Newspaper Design Principles to E-Learning: an Eye Tracking Study Focused on Multimedia

E-learning tools have gone through great development lately, actually changing the traditional learner-teacher interaction and learning paradigm. Successful information design for e-learning, however, needs careful choices about communication styles and structural elements, to create really useful, accessible and usable content. In this article we focus on the multimedia component of e-learning materials, which is surely one of their most distinctive features compared to conventional teaching. Unfortunately, despite the spreading and improvement of these systems, their usability issues are often not properly taken into account. In this paper we extend some results obtained from a previous study carried on on-line newspapers to the e-learning domain. In point of fact, we think that on-line newspapers and e-learning courses share several common points, especially for what concerns multimedia. The study has been carried out using an eye tracker, i.e. a device able to follow and record users’ gaze on the screen.