Effect Of Icon Presentation And Complexity On Icon Search Efficiency

With all kinds of intelligent devices becoming indispensable in people's daily life and work,the design and arrangement of icons in the graphical user interface will affect the efficiency and experience of users.In this study,from the perspective of visual search,combined with the attributes of visual complexity of icons,visual search paradigm is used to explore the impact of the arrangement of icons and the visual complexity of icons on user search efficiency.The study is divided into the following three experiments by using the within-subjects design:(1)Experiment 1a and experiment 1b are under the regular arrangement and irregular arrangement of interference icons,respectively.And from the perspective of the number of icons and the visual complexity of icons,the change of user search performance under different levels of icon number and complexity is explored.The results are as follows: the more complex the target icon is,the longer the response time of the subject is;the more interference icon is,the longer the response time is;in the case of simple target icon,even in the case of a lot of interference icons,the subjects search faster than complex targets.In addition,by comparing experiment 1a with experiment 1b,it is found that: the interaction between the number of icons and the arrangement of interference icons is significant.And in the case of a small number of interference icons,it takes longer for the subjects to search the target icon when the interference icons are arranged irregularly than when the interference icons are arranged regularly.However,in the case of more interference icons,there is no significant difference in response time between the irregular arrangement of interference icons and the regular arrangement of subjects' search target icons.(2)In experiment 2,the complexity of interference icon is taken into account.And it is found that when the complexity of the target icon is consistent with that of the interference icon,the response time of the subjects is significantly longer than that of the subjects when the complexity of the target icon is inconsistent with that of the interference icon.(3)In experiment 3,icon names are added,and the trend of experiment 3 results is the same as that of experiment 1a.Compared with experiment 1a,the results are as follows: in the case of having a name,the response time of the subjects is longer than that of the subjects without a name.In this study,a series of results can be used as reference for interface designers.For example,when designing icons,the structure of icons should be simplified as much as possible;when a large number of icons need to be placed on the interface,the differentiation can be increased as much as possible to facilitate the user's search;the function of canceling text naming can also be added for the user to choose independently according to their proficiency.