Visual Interface Design Research Articles

A Gestalt-like perceptual measure for home page design using a fuzzy entropy approach

A home page is an entry interface of hyperdocuments for presenting a Website's information to visitors, which is mostly concerned with human perception in terms of users’ comprehension and mental representation. As the theory of Gestalt psychology provides an important perspective in human perception, it is appropriate to apply this theory in evaluating the “wholeness” of a perceptual image. In home page design, organizing the visual pattern on the basis of Gestalt principles can lead to an efficient model for a better perception. However, human perception referring to the non-quantifiable, subjective, and affect-based experience is difficult to be objectively and uniformly measured by a conventional research approach. In this paper, we propose a Gestalt-like perceptual measure method by combining Gestalt grouping principles and fuzzy entropy. The purpose of this proposed method is not to evaluate the grades of alternatives, but to measure the Gestalt-like perceptual degrees for home page design. An experimental study was conducted to evaluate the practicability of this method. In Part 1 of the experiment, the weights of evaluated criteria were identified through the analytic hierarchy process (AHP) operation. A Gestalt-like perceptual measure for six selected home pages was further implemented in Part 2 of the experiment. The experimental study has shown a credible result. In addition to measuring the Gestalt perception of a Web page design, the proposed method can also be applied to related design fields such as plane design and other visual interface design.

Eye Movement and Reaction Time are Both Important in Assessment of Dialog Box Usability

Traditional usability metrics (accuracy and reaction time) were combined with eye movement patterns to study button placement and highlighting in dialog boxes. Participants made button-click responses based on the contents of the dialog box text. Traditional measures and eye movement patterns yielded different results: Reaction time analyses suggested placing the correct button to the left; eye movement patterns suggested placing the correct button on the right. This study demonstrated that eye movements are a rich source of information for usability research, provided theoretical guidelines for future research, and showed the strengths and weaknesses of eye tracking in comparison to more traditional usability metrics. In addition, it provided empirical support for eye movement heuristics that are often implemented in visual interface design, showing that the search patterns for dialog boxes follow a reading pattern.

Characteristics of attention and visual short–term memory: implications for visual interface design

Although the human retina can code many object images simultaneously, observers are often aware of only a tiny fraction of this information. These processing limitations of the visual brain have evolved to prioritize particularly relevant features of a scene while ignoring other irrelevant features. However, such selectivity has its drawbacks. In information-rich environments, such as driving a car or landing an aircraft, vision can fail to cope, and accidents can result. Accordingly, much recent research in psychophysics and ergonomics has examined how display characteristics affect our ability to process multiple features of the visual environment simultaneously. The majority of these experiments has found that performance can be optimized by combining several features into one visual 'object'. In contrast, several recent studies from my own laboratory have found the opposite pattern, indicating that information sources can often be more efficiently processed when they belong to separate objects. Indeed, these data suggest that the number of objects has no general effect on our perceptual performance. Instead, I argue for a two-pathway approach to understanding human visual capacities, and suggest that this approach may have important implications for a diverse range of display technologies, including cockpit displays.

Effects of Visual Interface Design, and Control Mode and Latency on Performance, Telepresence and Workload in a Teleoperation Task

Human-machine interfaces that facilitate telepresence are speculated to improve performance with teleoperators. Unfortunately, there is little experimental evidence to substantiate a direct link between the two. Further, there are limited data available on technological and psychological factors that affect telepresence. The objective of the present study was to evaluate the influence of interface design configuration, and control mode and latency on teleoperation performance, telepresence, and workload in a pick-and-place task. It was conducted to enhance understanding of the concept of telepresence and promote future development of telepresence-based guidelines for teleoperator systems. An experiment was conducted in which subjects were required to control a telerobot in a simple pick-and-place task through a virtual reality (VR) interface with or without live-video feedback on the motion of the robot. Rotational or translational motion control of the robot was studied under four control latencies ranging from 0 to 4 seconds. Results demonstrated significant benefits of using VR in conjunction with video feedback to control the telerobot. Rotational control appeared to better meet user expectations of robot motion control than modes involving translations of joint positions. Performance with the VR interface without live video feedback appeared to be sensitive to control latency. Correlation analysis provided further evidence of a positive link between telepresence and performance.

Visual user interface design tools

Visual user interface design tools

Panel on Visual Interface Design

User interface design has many components. Usable computer interfaces should be easy to learn, result in high user productivity and high user satisfaction. There are a number of components in user interface design that affect the usability of the interface. Within the human factors community we tend to emphasize the ergonomic and cognitive components of the computer interface. There is another component that is frequently ignored, the visual interface design. This panel will present information on the visual component in various user-computer interfaces and will discuss the contributions of the visual designer to the interfaces and usability.