Exploring the effects of icon characteristics on user performance: The role of icon concreteness, complexity, and distinctiveness.

Abstract

Because icons, signs, and symbols are now widely used to communicate information, it is essential for system designers to know what makes them easy to use and interpret. The authors report a series of studies that examine characteristics considered central to icon usability. After quantifying the properties of icon concreteness, complexity, and discriminability, the authors assessed each property's effects on user performance when user experience, task demands, and presentation context were systematically varied. Findings indicated that the effects of icon concreteness were primarily associated with the initial grasp of meaning, whereas complexity effects were found to persist longer and to be associated with search efficacy. The effects of icon distinctiveness were complex, but distinctiveness was enhanced by using both semantic and visual contrasts. The implications of these findings for interface design are discussed.

What makes icons appealing? The role of processing fluency in predicting icon appeal in different task contexts

“…Performance in both tasks was as predicted on the basis of previous findings (BenBassat & Shinar, 2006;Byrne, 1993, Chan & Ng, 2010Isherwood & McDougall, 2009;Lesch et al, 2011;McDougall et al, 2000;Shinar et al, 2010). Appeal ratings mirrored performance suggesting that participants were using a processing fluency heuristic when making appeal evaluations (see Figures 4-6).…”

“…When icons are pictorial they allow us to use our familiarity with what is depicted in order to make inferences about their meaning and so can enhance performance particularly in our initial encounters with them (e.g. Chang & Ng, 2010;Green & Barnard, 1990;McDougall et al, 2000). However, many icons are used for meanings which can be difficult to represent pictorially and we often rely on the frequency with which we have seen an icon and our learning of the icon-meaning relationship in order to understand icons.…”

“…This meant that participants had to search for a semantic rather than a visual match in the array. Critically, patterns of performance in the identification task are different from the search task employed in Experiment 2 (McDougall et al, 2000). Specifically, in this kind of task the expected pattern of results is as follows (see also Table 3):-(i) When icons are unfamiliar, the icon-function associations need to be learned, so in early learning trials unfamiliar icons will be identified less accurately than in later trials.…”

“…On the basis of previous research (McDougall et al, 2000;Scott, 2003) we expected that visual search for simple icons would be easier than for complex icons (i.e. a main effect of complexity).…”

Lisbon Symbol Database (LSD): Subjective norms for 600 symbols

“…For example, more complex images take longer time to categorize than simpler ones (e.g., Snodgrass & Vanderwart, 1980). Stimulus complexity has also been shown to have a negative influence on performance speed in visual search tasks (Byrne, 1993;McDougall, de Bruijn, & Curry, 2000;McDougall et al, 2006;Reppa, Playfoot, & McDougall, 2008). However, despite the important role of visual complexity in the visual search for symbols, complexity does not seem to be directly involved in symbol identification (McDougall et al, 2000; see also Biederman, 1987;Paivio, Clark, Digdon, & Bons, 1989;Snodgrass & Corwin, 1988;Snodgrass & Yuditsky, 1996).…”