Visual diversity and user interface quality

Abstract

Live graphical user interfaces (GUIs) do change responding to user actions, unlike GUI screenshots, which are often used in studies. The user experiences and is affected by transitions between the layouts (e.g., webpages or mobile app screens) of interactive systems. Such transitions affect the overall impression of system quality and should be accounted for by any model or computational method estimating the quality and claiming high ecological validity. However, the recent efforts aspiring to predict GUI quality computationally have only relied on homepages or home screens of apps, or their screenshots. The dynamics of GUI -GUI change across pages and layouts, or shorter, visual diversity -have been given little attention. Here we present an initial exploration of GUI visual diversity. In three studies, we demonstrate that a) GUI diversity can be measured computationally; b) GUI diversity correlates with GUI aesthetics impression and other, more highlevel GUI-preference constructs; and c) GUI diversity matters in both website and mobile app contexts. We believe the concept of GUI visual diversity deserves further studies.

Scout: Rapid Exploration of Interface Layout Alternatives through High-Level Design Constraints

“…Given Scout's focus on spatial arrangement, we defined diversity as spatial diversity. Although there are existing computer vision dissimilarity metrics [34], they are not suitable to compare the wireframes from our study (i.e., the fact that wireframes are primarily whitespace causes these approaches to fail). We instead developed a spatial diversity score to estimate the effort needed to adapt one layout to another (i.e, transformation distance [16]).…”

Quality Control in Crowdsourcing

“…In line with our comment on the quality attributes regarding UI quality, also in terms of assessment methods there is huge room for improvement. Significant effort still needs to be invested into the development of proper guidelines for the design of intuitive and robust task UIs, as well as into automated methods of their assessment, e.g., as attempted by Miniukovich and De Angeli [2015]. -Runtime analytics.…”

Rico

“…Prior work has explored models for predicting users' first impressions of web pages [31,18], mobile app screens [25,24], and mobile app icons [27]. Other research has focused on predicting longer-term perception based on animations [36], menus [21], and visual diversity and consistency between different screens [37,26].…”