Cognitive Design of User Interface: Incorporating Cognitive Styles into Format, Structure and Representation Dimensions

Abstract

In line to the introduction of the online museum, a user interface is a new medium to allow museum collections to be exhibited and promoted more effectively. For promoting purposes, this paper stresses on an establishment of the digital collection structure and the improvement of the interface design for users. It is critical to pay attention to the cognitive design and ensure that the interface is usable in order to help users understand the displayed information. The user interface design for online museum has commanded significant attention from designers and researchers but lacks in the cognitive design perspective. In the effort to formalize the design, this report is the extension of the initial work on a user interface design framework in understanding cognitive based user interface design. The individual differences approach is adopted to explore possible user interface design elements. This study improves the framework by conducting empirical investigation to test the hypotheses linkage between cognitive styles and user interface dimensions. The research method involves using Field Dependent and Field Independent as the case study and web-based survey on online museum visitors. The result of the analysis suggests cognitive styles do influence user interface dimensions. These design elements contain the implications for user interface design of the online environment, cognitive design of user interface development, and the identification of cognitive design of user interface for cultural website that support user while browsing for museum online collections. The effort may contribute towards increasing the usability level of the website.