Evaluating Visual Consistency of Icon Usage in Across-Devices

Abstract

Interface icons are often scaled to adapt to different displays in cross-device collaborations. However, adaptive scaling of icons may cause perceptual bias in how icon arrays are visually perceived, which reduces usability and coherent user experience. This article presents an empirical study that evaluates the perceptual bias in the consistency of icon spacing and size caused by adaptive scaling. Then the impact of various visual features of icons (i.e., the border shape, polarity, and composition) on the perceptual bias are investigated. In this study, we found that cross-device scaling of icons causes a perceptual bias in the consistency of icon spacing and size. The shape of the icon border has a significant difference in the perceived spacing of icons, and the bias of the round shape is smaller than that of the square shape. Moreover, changing the icon polarity can affect the perceptual bias of consistency in icon size. These findings are expected to propose scaling recommendations for improving the visual consistency of icon arrays across.