Spatially Oriented and Person Oriented Thinking—Implications for User Interface Design

Abstract

Identifying aspects of individual cognitive variation of relevance for the design of instructional multimedia is argued to be an important research task. A study is presented in which two candidates, person oriented thinking and spatially oriented thinking, were explored. Two different user interfaces to an application, one with a person related format and the other with a spatial format, were used, and participants were asked to choose between the two versions and to motivate their choice. Two main tendencies appeared. Interface preferences tended to correlate with style of thought as well as with gender.