Influence of visual design on young users’ attention to digital museum homepages: an eye-tracking study

Digital museum websites are often the first point of contact with collections, but their homepage designs vary in effectiveness at attracting and guiding attention. We examined how visual design elements affect the perceived appeal and attention distribution on digital museum homepages for young users. Mixed methods were used: interviews and a focus group identified candidate elements, a self-report study (n=70) rated museum homepages, and an eye-tracking experiment (n=40) tested six virtual homepages representing the most and least appealing sites. Paired t-tests and a generalized linear mixed model (GLMM) were used to analyze appeal ratings, and the eye-tracking heat maps with fixation-order metrics characterized attention patterns. Homepages with more hypothesized elements were rated as more appealing. Effect on appeal, while concise layouts (effect. Eye-tracking showed that pages with large images (especially with simple animations) attracted early, focused fixations, whereas pages lacking these features produced more dispersed gaze patterns. These findings suggest that homepages with more appealing images and less distracting elements are more likely to attract attention and encourage engagement.