Research On Public Information Device Interface Design Based On Cognitive Load

Public information devices (PID) like self-service terminals are providing more and more services in people’s daily life. PID users are diversified. However, the interface design of PID is mainly focused on mainstream users familiar with Hi-Tech products, lack of research on the interaction experience of users unfamiliar with technology products. Moreover, the public context of PID can cause the distractions for users’ intention, and increase user’s cognitive load during interactions. PID users’ diversified cognitive skills and public context become the main challenge for PID interface design. Comparing with traditional user interfaces, PID user interface research is still lack of relatively mature and systematic theories and methodologies both in interactive technology development and in design work. Current related studies mainly apply traditional design methods into PID interface design, with mainstream users as design target. Few interaction experience studies focuses on non-mainstream users mainly rely on user testing and usability evaluations in the latter stage of the design projects, which increase extra design cost. Therefore, how to reduce users’ cognitive load and build appropriate PID interface design method catering for users’ diversified cognitive skills is a research question needed special attention.There are two ways to reduce users’ cognitive load during interactions. One is the simplify interface interaction flows, the other is to provide interface information can be easily understood by majority users. With the above mentioned two ways as the starting point, the author applies the resources model based on distributed cognition theory into the interaction design process of PID, and proposes a PID interface interaction design model. With this model as the foundation, the PID interface design method is put forward to help designers make reasonable design decisions for interface information allocations, simplify interface interaction flows during design process, allocating cognitive resources to systems, and provide appropriate affordances for PID users to understand interface information. The proposed PID interface design method aims at reducing PID interface design cost for designers, helping designers minimize users’ cognitive load during design process, and enha- ncing non-mainstream users’interaction experience, so that users with different cognitive skills can complete basic interaction tasks on PIDs, and PID users’diversified requirements related to cognitive skills can be met.The author studies PID user interface on interaction design theories, design methodologies, and evaluation methodologies. From the perspective of PID users’diversified cognitive skills, the author conducts a PID user study to extract the main factors influencing PID users’cognitions, and builds a PID users’ cognition influential factors model to support the design and evaluation work of the research. From the perspective of interaction design theories, with the resources modei of distributed cognition as the basis, the author proposes a PID interface interaction model, the information structure and interaction strategies of the model are used to guide the construction of the PID interface interaction design method. From the perspective of design work, the author proposes a PID interface interaction design method based on PID interface interaction model, and describes the specific applications of the proposed method through design examples. From the perspective of usability evaluation, the author proposes a PID interface evaluation method based on users’cognitive load, and carries out tapping test and comparison test to validate the effectiveness and feasibility of the proposed PID interface interaction design method. Tests results show that testing prototype designed by the proposed PID interface interaction design method can significantly enhance users’interaction performance and satisfaction, reduce users’ cognitive load during interaction process, and enhance non-mainstream users’ experience. The proposed PID interface interaction model, design and evaluation method can help PID interface designers and researchers carry out relevant PID interface design and research work, and promote the extension of various PIDs in self-service industry.