An Ergonomics Study On Icon Design Style Of Mobile Device Interface

According to Google statistical data,the average number of applications installed on each smartphone is 20 expected to increase to 61 in the near future,which means it could more difficult for users to seek for a certain icon in the interactive interface.How to quickly search the target icon in a number of icons has become the focus of ergonomics research.In this paper,we use the experimental method to explore whether the different icon design styles(rounded rectangle IOS style,frameless shaped Android style,and simple graphed Win phone style)will affect the performance of visual search task in the intelligent mobile device environment,using eye movement technology to explore the icon design styles in the study.This study includes four experiments.In the first part,we studies the preference of the current mainstream icon styles by questionnaire,and selects three types of icons as materials to carry out the visual research task to explore the performance differences among them.The second study includes two experiments.In experiment one,we select rounded rectangles and frameless shapes as two subjects,and control the variables color to complete the task of icon search.In experiment 2,based on the study of two type’s icon,we designed 40 rounded rectangles and frameless shaped style icons as experiment materials,and controlled the variables of familiarity to better illustrate the effect of rounded rectangle box on icon search performance.Thirdly,on the basis of the second research,from the behavior research to the eye movement,the eye movement mechanism of the icon search process is explored through the analysis of the number of fixation,fixation time and fixation trajectory.From the experimental results,the following conclusions are drawn:(1)The subjective preference of the questionnaire shows that the preference of the rounded rectangle style is the highest among the groups using three systems,indicating that the rounded rectangle style is the most popular.In the crowd with the preference of frameless style icon,The largest proportioned people are Android system users,and as to the preference of simple graphed style icon,the users of Win phone system,take up the largest proportion,indicating that the current use of the system icon will affect the preference of icon style.(2)Icon style affects search performance.Compared with Rounded Rectangle(IOS)and Win phone style,frameless style(Android)is more conducive to users’ visual search time and accuracy.And rounded rectangle causes better performance in searching time and accuracy.The reason of this difference can be summed up as familiarity,perceptual clue,metaphor and integrality.(3)The complexity of the task has a certain influence on the search performance: the lower task complexity is,the better performance comes;whether we can get remarkable results lies on the complexity of task;when the task difficulty is low,the difference in icon style search results is not so huge;in the complex task,the icon style search results is absolutely different,frameless shaped style(Android)is obviously better than the other.(4)Eye movement results shows that rounded rectangle icons needs more cognitive resources during the searching process,but rounded rectangle icons consumed fewer cognition resources after finding the target icon.Therefore,rounded rectangle icon search has the advantage in the simple search task with smaller search interface and fewer icons.If the number of the search interface icons increase,frameless icon search performance is better.In this study,icon search task is used to explore the search performance of different design style icons.Optimal icon design style is supposed to be found in order to improve the performance of icon search.The results of this study will help people to further understand the key role icon design style play for the users’ operation,and to provide a scientific basis for icon design.