Perspectives toward the stereotype production method for public symbol design: A case study of novice designers

This study investigated the practices and attitudes of novice designers toward user involvement in public symbol design at the conceptual design stage, i.e. the stereotype production method. Differences between male and female novice designers were examined. Forty-eight novice designers (24 male, 24 female) were asked to design public symbol referents based on suggestions made by a group of users in a previous study and provide feedback with regard to the design process. The novice designers were receptive to the adoption of user suggestions in the conception of the design, but tended to modify the pictorial representations generated by the users to varying extents. It is also significant that the male and female novice designers appeared to emphasize different aspects of user suggestions, and the female novice designers were more positive toward these suggestions than their male counterparts. The findings should aid the optimization of the stereotype production method for user-involved symbol design.     

Age-related differences in warning symbol comprehension and training effectiveness: effects of familiarity, complexity, and comprehensibility

Age-related changes in selective attention, inhibitory efficiency, and the ability to form new associations suggest that older adults may have greater difficulty with more complex and less comprehensible symbols. We examined comprehension of symbols varying in terms of ratings of familiarity, complexity, and comprehensibility, by younger (aged 18-35) and older (aged 55-70) adults. It was found that older adults have greater difficulty than younger adults in comprehending warning symbols and that accident scenario training improves comprehension. Regression analyses indicated that familiarity and comprehensibility were important in determining performance on the pre-training comprehension test by both younger and older adults. However, training eliminated the effects of stimulus characteristics for younger adults, while older adults' comprehension continued to be significantly influenced by comprehensibility. We suggest that symbol design incorporates cues to knowledge to facilitate the linkage between new knowledge (i.e. the warning symbol) and relevant knowledge in long-term memory. Statement of Relevance: Symbol characteristics play an important role in age-related differences in warning symbol comprehension. To optimise comprehension by older adults, symbols should have a clear relationship with areal-world referent. Alternatively, symbol design could incorporate cues to knowledge to facilitate the linkage between new knowledge and relevant knowledge in long-term memory.     

Communication effectiveness of symbolic safety signs with different user groups

Contrary to popular belief, little systematic evaluation has been undertaken of how well public information signs convey their intended message. The application of a proposed evaluation procedure, involving an initial Recognition Test and a subsequent Recall Test, to a set of occupational safety signs is reported. Respondents comprised migrants and native-born Australian attending adult literacy classes, including a group of recently-arrived Vietnamese. Despite inter-group differences in the total number of signs correctly identified on both Recognition and Recall Tests, the same signs gave rise to difficulty for all groups. The sources of difficulty are discussed in terms of distinctiveness of referents, comprehension of shape and colour code, and translation from symbol to referent. The implications of the test results for user education programmes is also considered.     

The use of contextual cues to improve warning symbol comprehension: making the connection for older adults

This study teased apart the effects of comprehensibility and complexity on older adults' comprehension of warning symbols by manipulating the relevance of additional information in further refining the meaning of the symbol. Symbols were systematically altered such that increased visual complexity (in the form of contextual cues) resulted in increased comprehensibility. One hundred older adults, aged 50–71 years, were tested on their comprehension of these symbols before and after training. High comprehensibility–complexity symbols were found to be better understood than low- or medium-comprehensibility–complexity symbols and the effectiveness of the contextual cues varied as a function of training. Therefore, the nature of additional detail determines whether increased complexity is detrimental or beneficial to older adults' comprehension – if the additional details provide ‘cues to knowledge’, older adults' comprehension improves as a result of the increased complexity. However, some cues may require training in order to be effective.

Practitioner Summary: Research suggests that older adults have greater difficulty in understanding more complex symbols. However, we found that when the complexity of symbols was increased through the addition of contextual cues, older adults' comprehension actually improved. Contextual cues aid older adults in making the connection between the symbol and its referent.     

Evaluating the impact of the center control touch screen of new energy vehicles on user visual imagery and preferences

In recent years, with the changes in the international energy situation, new energy vehicles (NEVs) have become an essential choice for people to travel. The center control touch screen (CCTS) of NEVs is an important part of the user's interaction with the vehicle, which is quite different from a conventional fuel vehicle. Therefore, it is necessary to conduct research on the CCTS of NVEs. This study integrates multiple research methods to investigate the visual imagery and user preferences for CCTSs in NEVs. The results of the study show that the horizontal version with small rounded angles without a border is the optimal design solution for the visual imagery dimension, whereas the vertical version with large rounded angles and a border is the worst design solution in terms of the visual imagery dimension. The design without a border can increase users' preference and purchase intention to a certain extent. The results of the above study can effectively reflect the potential user demand for NEVs’ CCTSs, which also has positive implications for enhancing the overall user experience of NEVs.     

浅论汉字符号意象化构成与视觉传达设计的关系

中国的汉字属于表意文字,作为一种汉文化的载体符号,它具有独特的意象化构成魅力且汉字自身的演化与进步就是其意象化构成表达的无尽延伸与发展。本文旨在通过对汉字符号意象化构成的分析与概括,挖掘出汉字通过意象化构成魅力来传达丰富的视觉信息的特征,并找到它与视觉传达设计内在规律相契合的关系,以及这种特质对视觉传达设计的作用。从而为进一步拓宽视觉传达设计的表现空间,丰富它的设计语言而添砖加瓦。     

Safety symbol comprehension: effects of symbol type, familiarity, and age

A new procedure for evaluating symbol comprehension, the phrase generation procedure, was assessed with 52 younger and 52 older adults. Participants generated as many phrases as came to mind when viewing 40 different safety symbols (hazard alerting, mandatory action, prohibition, and information symbols). Symbol familiarity was also assessed. Comprehension rates for both groups were lower than the 85% level recommended by the American National Standards Institute. Moreover, older participants' comprehension was significantly worse than younger participants', and the older adults also generated significantly fewer phrases. Generally, prohibition symbols were comprehended best and hazard alerting symbols worst. In addition, symbol familiarity was positively correlated with symbol comprehension. These findings indicate that important safety information depicted on signs and household products may be misunderstood if presented in symbolic form. Furthermore, certain types of symbols may be better understood (e.g., prohibition symbols) than other types (e.g., hazard alerting symbols) by both younger and older individuals. These findings signify the utility of the phrase generation procedure as a method for evaluating symbol comprehension, particularly when it is not possible or desirable to provide contextual information. Actual or potential applications of this research include using the phrase generation approach to identify poorly comprehended symbols, including identification of critical confusions that may arise when processing symbolic information.     

A study of cognitive human factors in mascot design

Although understanding of the cognitive factors affecting subjects is critical in design, such objective methods to assist designers are rare. Mascots have been widely used for corporate identity and to arouse public attention. Despite their increasingly important usage, effective design is certainly a worthwhile topic. This paper presents a cognitive approach to study human factors affecting mascot design. Multidimensional scaling analysis is also performed to transform subjects' similarity judgment and preference rating score into geometric distance for a multidimensional configuration. The meanings associated with dimensions are then interpreted and discussed, along with subject preference and individual differences analyzed as well. Results presented herein provide designers with a valuable reference for designing a successful mascot.Relevance to industryThe mascot has been widely used as a symbol for visual identity. Designers must know what the primary factors users need to recognize the mascot. Results in this study provide a direction for designers to concentrate their efforts on designing a good mascot for corporate identity.     

Frequency symbol spreading based adaptive subcarrier block selection for OFDMA system

In a wireless network, the signals transmitted from one sender to different users have independent channel fluctuation characteristics. The diversity that exists between users is called multiuser diversity and can be exploited by the sender to enhance the capacity of wireless network. In multiuser diversity OFDMA system, exploiting channel fluctuation diversity is in essence done by selecting the user with the strong subcarrier channels. The individual subcarrier selection for each user can achieve the best system performance but high signaling overhead and high system complexity are required. On the other hand, the adaptive subcarrier block method achieves worse BER than that of individual subcarrier selection. This is because the selected block contains the poor channel subcarriers. To overcome this problem, in this paper, we propose an adaptive subcarrier block selection with frequency symbol spreading for an OFDMA system.     

SmallWorlds: Visualizing Social Recommendations

We present SmallWorlds, a visual interactive graph‐based interface that allows users to specify, refine and build item‐preference profiles in a variety of domains. The interface facilitates expressions of taste through simple graph interactions and these preferences are used to compute personalized, fully transparent item recommendations for a target user. Predictions are based on a collaborative analysis of preference data from a user's direct peer group on a social network. We find that in addition to receiving transparent and accurate item recommendations, users also learn a wealth of information about the preferences of their peers through interaction with our visualization. Such information is not easily discoverable in traditional text based interfaces. A detailed analysis of our design choices for visual layout, interaction and prediction techniques is presented. Our evaluations discuss results from a user study in which SmallWorlds was deployed as an interactive recommender system on Facebook.     

社交网络用户隐私泄露量化评估方法

社交网络用户隐私泄露的量化评估有利于帮助用户了解个人隐私泄露状况,提高公众隐私保护和防范意识,同时也能为个性化隐私保护方法的设计提供依据.针对目前隐私量化评估方法主要用于评估隐私保护方法的保护效果,无法有效评估社交网络用户的隐私泄露风险的问题,提出了一种社交网络用户隐私泄露量化评估方法.基于用户隐私偏好矩阵,利用皮尔逊...     

Effects of smartphone icon background shapes and figure/background area ratios on visual search performance and user preferences

Smartphones are becoming increasingly popular, users are provided with various interface styles with different designed icons. Icon, as an important competent of user interface, is regarded to be more efficient and pleasurable. However, compared with desktop computers, fewer design principles on smartphone icon were proposed. This paper investigated the effects of icon background shape and the figure/background area ratio on visual search performance and user preference. Icon figures combined with six different geometric background shapes and five different figure/background area ratios were studied on three different screens in experiments with 40 subjects. The results of an analysis of variance (ANOVA) showed that these two independent variables (background shape and figure/background area ratio) significantly affected the visual search performance and user preference. On 3.5-in (1 in=0.025 4 m) and 4.0-in displays, unified backgroundwould be optimal, shapes such as square, circle and transitions between them (e.g., rounded square, squircle, etc.) are recommended because backgrounds in these shapes yield a better search time performance and subjective satisfaction for ease of use, search and visual preference. A 60% figure/background area ratio is the most appropriate for smartphone icon design on the 3.5-in screen, while a 50% area ratio could be a suggestion for both relatively optimized search performance and user preference on 4.0-in. In terms of the 4.7-in, icon figure is used directly for its better performance and preference compared with icons with background.     

A method for product form design of integrating interactive genetic algorithm with the interval hesitation time and user satisfaction

Due to the continuous release of new products, manufacturers are paying attention to customer-oriented design of products that meet user needs to minimize the risk of their products being rejected by the market. Due to the ambiguity of user cognition, it is difficult to accurately obtain the user's preference for individual productions. To respond to the challenge, we propose an engineering scientific research method of interactive genetic algorithm with the interval arithmetic based on hesitation and fuzzy kano model(FKM) to explore the emotional needs of users for product forms and drive product modeling evolution design. Through expert interviews, the morphological characteristics and perceptual images factors of the products attracting users are investigated. In order to identify the user's satisfaction relationship with the perceptual images, we use FKM to analyze the product image style that meets the user's kansei needs accurately and selects 5 factors which is attractive attributes. Meanwhile, we attempt to transform this 5 factors into evaluation carrier to guide the evolution direction of product styling in HIIF-IGA, and then optimized four electric bikes with scores over 8.8 so that it could realize user demand-driven product evolution design. To handle users' ambiguity, the FAHP method is used to quantify the user's emotional imagery criterion and create a product evolution design system platform, which can automatically generate product styling design scheme in line with user preferences. This experimental results show that the proposed method can help enterprises effectively improve customer satisfaction and reduce the cost and time of product development.     

Evaluation of a set of graphic symbols

To evaluate the efficiency of a coherent set of graphic symbols for public information in railway stations, a matching procedure was used, in which a referent was specified to respondents, and they were asked to select the appropriate symbol from the complete set of symbols shown to them. Data were collected in such a way that the effects of age and travel experience could be evaluated separately. A total of 29 symbols was evaluated using 11 600 railway passengers as respondents. The results show that only half the number of symbols meet a criterion of 67% correct responses. Both increasing age and a low level of travel experience have a deteriorating effect on the understanding of the symbols. In addition to the percentage correct responses, analysis of the confusions between referents and symbols allows a more detailed assessment of the causes of a low efficiency of a symbol or a group of symbols. It is demonstrated that, based mainly on the measured confusions between symbols, proposals for the redesign of symbols can be formulated.     

Designing for users: implications for manufacturers and employers

Abstract

Ergonomic design of computer workstations requires an understanding of user needs by manufacturers and employers. Manufacturers must develop equipment allowing users to maximize their efficiency while minimizing stress. Employers must arrange proper workstation configurations. The ‘best’ design can fail if it is not appropriate for the task or the specific population of users. At one company requesting an evaluation of its adjustable computer workstations, employer and manufacturer failed to address simple user requirements. Job analyses were not adequately performed, and test procedures comparing workstations were probably biased. Casually questioning workers revealed little preference for these newer workstations compared with their older, more traditional, workstations. Recommendations for this company stressed task requirements, likely future changes in task demands and user needs. Emphasis on single factors, such as the universal use of adjustable desks, was substituted for a more coherent picture of the entire job and its requirements.     

An investigation of handheld device use by older adults with age-related macular degeneration

This study investigates factors affecting handheld human - computer interaction (HCI) for older adults with Age-related Macular Degeneration (AMD). This is largely an uncharted territory, as empirical investigations of HCI concerning users with visual dysfunction and/or older adults have focused primarily on desktop computers. For this study, participants with AMD and visually healthy controls used a handheld computer to search, select and manipulate familiar playing card icons under varied icon set sizes, inter-icon spacing and auditory feedback conditions. While all participants demonstrated a high rate of task completion, linear regression revealed several relationships between task efficiency and the interface, user characteristics and ocular factors. Two ocular measures, severity of AMD and contrast sensitivity, were found to be highly predictive of efficiency. The outcomes of this work reveal that users with visual impairments can effectively interact with graphical user interfaces on small displays in the presence of low-cost, easily implemented design interventions. Furthermore, results demonstrate that the detrimental influence of AMD and contrast sensitivity on handheld technology interaction can be offset by such interventions. This study presents a rich data set and is intended to inspire future work characterizing and modeling the interactions of individuals with visual impairments with non-traditional information technology platforms and contexts.     

Multi-Attribute Preferences Mining Method for Group Users with the Process of Noise Reduction

Traditional researches on user preferences mining mainly explore the user's overall preferences on the pro ject, but ignore that the fundamental motivation of user preferences comes from their attitudes on some attributes of the pro ject. In addition, traditional researches seldom consider the typical preferences combination of group users, which may have influence on the personalized service for group users. To solve this problem, a method with noise reduction for group user preferences mining is proposed, which focuses on mining the multi-attribute preference tendency of group users. Firstly, both the availability of data and the noise interference on preferences mining are considered in the algorithm design. In the process of generating group user preferences, a new path is used to generate preference keywords so as to reduce the noise interference. Secondly, the Gibbs sampling algorithm is used to estimate the parameters of the model. Finally, using the user comment data of several online shopping websites as experimental objects, the method is used to mine the multi-attribute preferences of different groups. The proposed method is compared with other methods from three aspects of predictive ability, preference mining ability and preference topic similarity. Experimental results show that the method is significantly better than other existing methods.     

Determination of optimal product styles by ordinal logistic regression versus conjoint analysis for kitchen faucets

In this study, a two-stage integrated approach is proposed and implemented to explore user perceptions about kitchen faucet styles and to find optimal levels of design parameters related to product appearance. At the first stage, a group of representative users have been asked to judge 38 systematically selected different faucet designs by using a semantic differential (SD) scale for 11 image (kansei) words about their visual perceptions. Then the relations between overall preference and kansei word scores of users are investigated by Ordinal Logistic Regression (OLOGREG). The model obtained helps understand how customers describe highly preferred designs. It can also be used to confirm if a product design will be highly preferred. At the second stage, the relations between overall preference scores and design parameter levels related to the product appearance are modeled using again OLOGREG, and then the best design parameter levels for visual perceptions are found by maximizing the overall preference scores. The results are confirmed and discussed. They are also compared to those of a commonly used approach in the literature, Conjoint Analysis (CA). This comparison has showed that the OLOGREG approach is superior to traditional CA. Finally, it is discussed how the product style design optimization approach presented and demonstrated in this study for the case of some kitchen faucets can be used in general for other products.Relevance to industry: Developing a user-centered product is an important policy of an enterprise in today's highly competitive marketplace. To reach this objective, a systematic method is proposed by integrating several techniques. This method will be useful to any industry that designs and produces consumer products. These products more fit the consumer needs and the competitiveness of them are improved.     

Human factors design considerations for public videotex input devices

Eight experiments which formed an integral part of a comprehensive human factors investigation on the design of an input device for public videotex services are reported. Results of the first phase led to the design and construction of two simple keypad devices: a linear configuration, with function keys and numerics arranged in horizontal rows, and a square arrangement, with the function keys clustered around a touch-telephone numeric layout. Evaluation of these keypads with 130 novice users was carried out in Phase Two. While there was little difference in performance between the two pads, an interaction between user preference and duration of use was apparent. A slight preference was indicated for the linear pad on initial presentation but preference shifted towards the square arrangement as the duration of use increased. In the third, and major, phase of the research programme, the two simple keypads were compared with a small alphanumeric keypad and a full-sized keyboard. Results showed that novice users consistently performed best with the simple pads and showed a clear preference for these devices over the alphanumeric keypad and full keyboard. The experienced users, who had been trained on the full-sized keyboard, showed no advantage in performance with this device over the simple pads or the alphanumeric keypad but did indicate a clear preference for the keyboard. These results confirm that, with respect to input devices for public videotex systems, differential requirements exist for different types of users. For a diverse group such as the general public, a minimal function keypad appears to be the best compromise device for simple information retrieval tasks.