User Experience of the Mobile Terminal Customization System: The Influence of Interface Design and Educational Background on Personalized Customization

Abstract

The study verified the role that different interface designs and users’ educational backgrounds play in the task performance and subjective evaluation of mobile terminal customization system. Interface type (based on scroll, alternative, and attribute) and user group (college students and industrial workers) were employed as the variables. A total of 72 users were included in the study, and an analysis of 3 × 2 between-participants design indicated that (1) Different interface designs of customization systems had a significant difference in task performance, the alternative based interface had the best results in the task performance, and there was no significant difference between the attribute-based and scroll-based interfaces in task performance; (2) The matching between educational background and interface type will affect the users’ evaluation on system usability. Industrial workers thought that the scroll-based and alternative-based interfaces were more useable, while college students preferred attribute-based interface design; (3) Different interfaces had a significant difference in user task load. The scroll-based interface had the lowest mental demand on the users, while alternative-based had the lowest physical demand on the users, though it consumed more effort; (4) Different educational backgrounds had a significant difference in user task load. Industrial workers showed lower effort in the scroll-based and alternative-based interfaces, while college students had lower effort in the attribution-based interface; (5) A correlation analysis showed that there was a significant negative correlation between the system usability score and the effort in task load. This study results have a positive significance for interface design. With educational background and layout as two important factors in our interface design, we may obtain the most appropriate design principles for enhancing the online customization experiences of different groups of consumers. The more important is that this study is based on the actual needs of the industry. For the first time, we take suitcase as an online customized product, which may not only help local manufacturers to extend their traditional offline distribution channels to online, but also provide a constructive thinking concerning interface design for customization of a single product.

Exploring the Role of Visual Design in Digital Public Health Safety Education

“…Therefore, we have reason to believe that when the subjects are not college students but the elderly, the results of the study are likely to change. Yi et al [49] reported that educational level affected the user's preference for interface layout, and the user group with a higher educational level (such as college students) preferred an interface with rich operational gestures, which was contrary to our finding. In our study, compared to the waterfall-type layout, juxtaposition-type layout adds the gesture of sliding left and right but it does not receive preference because of this new gesture.…”

“…Interface layout was another independent variable. As we have introduced in related work, interface layout can affect people's cognitive process, which has been confirmed by multiple research fields [47,49,51]. Considering that all of our subjects were Chinese, the interface layout should conform to the user's habits and experience from the perspective of cognitive psychology [51], so this study analyzed 26 common interface layouts of digital education Apps in China rather than in overseas markets as the source of inspiration for layout design.…”

“…Layout design aims to plan the organization of interface information, in order to help users browse content efficiently, reduce users' tasks and cognitive load, and try to solve the problem of disorientation faced by many users [15]. Although the research on interface layout spans many fields, such as online education [17,46,47], e-commerce [48,49] and Man-Machine systems [50,51], its core idea is to optimize the processing process when users receive information, and to improve task performance. A key element in layout design is that the layout needs to meet the information search strategies of different groups.…”

“…Another study has confirmed that interface layout can significantly affect consumers' shopping time, and there is an interaction between the interface layout and educational background. People with lower education level reject an interface that provides too many choices, because it is not in line with their usual offline consumption habits; on the contrary, people with higher education preferred an interface layout offering rich options [49].…”

Design and Evaluation of the Interface of Recreational Intelligent Escort Products

“…Numerous scholars have explored HRIs from different perspectives. Yi et al [5] verified the role played by different interface designs and users' educational backgrounds on task performance and subjective evaluations of mobile terminal customization systems. Reddy et al [6] investigated whether, for older adults, redundancy in the interface is advantageous over text or symbol-based interfaces during early or intermittent device use.…”