Structure Matters: Effects of Semantic Relatedness and Proximity on Consumer Search and Integration Tasks

Abstract

Information displays should be clear and easily understood. This research examined whether principles developed by Kosslyn (1989) and Carswell and Wickens (1987) for charts, graphs, and object displays could be extended, or adapted, to another type of display, the food item package. We hypothesized that a food package on which label items had been arranged according to their similarity, or semantic relatedness, would facilitate better user performance than a package on which label items had been arranged in other ways. Participants rated the semantic relatedness of 12 label items found on a common food item package. Using multi-dimensional scaling (MDS) outputs from the ratings, we created three versions of a consumer cough drop package: 1) Similarity version—label elements that received higher similarity ratings were depicted closer together than elements with lower similarity ratings, 2) Dissimilarity version—elements that received higher similarity ratings were depicted farther apart than elements with lower similarity ratings, 3) Random version—rating values were randomly assigned to the pairs of elements. We tested user performance on search tasks and integrative tasks on each of the three versions. We hypothesized that the Similarity version would produce the best user performance and the Dissimilarity version would produce the worst. Results only partially supported the hypotheses. On the search tasks, the best performance was achieved on the Similarity and Dissimilarity versions, and the worst on the Random version. On the integrative tasks, the version made no difference in performance. Possible reasons for these results are discussed. Similar results by Fitts and Deininger (1954) and Morin and Grant (1955) suggest that performance on tasks are superior when the relationships are in an ordered structure, rather than randomly assigned, possibly because ordered structures make possible the development of search strategies, whereas random arrangements do not.