Abstract
BackgroundThis article aims to demonstrate computational synthesis of Web-based experiments in undertaking experimentation on relationships among the participants' design preference, rationale, and cognitive test performance. The exemplified experiments were computationally synthesised, including the websites as materials, experiment protocols as methods, and cognitive tests as protocol modules. This work also exemplifies the use of a website synthesiser as an essential instrument enabling the participants to explore different possible designs, which were generated on the fly, before selection of preferred designs.MethodsThe participants were given interactive tree and table generators so that they could explore some different ways of presenting causality information in tables and trees as the visualisation formats. The participants gave their preference ratings for the available designs, as well as their rationale (criteria) for their design decisions. The participants were also asked to take four cognitive tests, which focus on the aspects of visualisation and analogy-making. The relationships among preference ratings, rationale, and the results of cognitive tests were analysed by conservative non-parametric statistics including Wilcoxon test, Krustal-Wallis test, and Kendall correlation.ResultsIn the test, 41 of the total 64 participants preferred graphical (tree-form) to tabular presentation. Despite the popular preference for graphical presentation, the given tabular presentation was generally rated to be easier than graphical presentation to interpret, especially by those who were scored lower in the visualization and analogy-making tests.ConclusionsThis piece of evidence helps generate a hypothesis that design preferences are related to specific cognitive abilities. Without the use of computational synthesis, the experiment setup and scientific results would be impractical to obtain.
Highlights
This article aims to demonstrate computational synthesis of Web-based experiments in undertaking experimentation on relationships among the participants’ design preference, rationale, and cognitive test performance
Background of participants There was no significant difference in any background variable between two groups of participants as measured by the pre-experiment questionnaire and analysed by Student’s t-test and Wilcoxon test
The participants rated the strength of their preferences as:
Summary
This article aims to demonstrate computational synthesis of Web-based experiments in undertaking experimentation on relationships among the participants’ design preference, rationale, and cognitive test performance. This work exemplifies the use of a website synthesiser as an essential instrument enabling the participants to explore different possible designs, which were generated on the fly, before selection of preferred designs. The manner of external representation (or presentation) could affect our way of working with the internal representation (mentally) and our understanding of the information [1], e.g. in cockpit information displays for aviation [2], but few results on graphical external representation can be generalised [3]. One problem affecting all websites is that there is no reliable, general and abstract method for predicting the effect of presentation rhetorics and modality on understanding of the information. Visualisation of aviation accident events generally use causal trees to represent the causal relations but there are few empirical studies on both preference and perception of causality visualisation.
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