Research On Cognitive Ergonomics And Influence Factors Of Different Icons

Nowadays,icons are widely used in Graphical User Interfaces(GUI).Icons can have two different styles:Skeuomorphic icon and Flat icon.Skeuomorphism is also called imitation or simulation.It applies the texture of real objects to give people a real feeling.Skeuomorphic icon uses gradient,highlight,texture and shadow to simulate real objects.It is usually displayed by 3D graphics.In contrast,flat icon is displayed by 2D graphics without stereo visual features.Up to now,researches on icon style have been mainly focused on theoretical analysis,and there are few experimental researches to examine its impact on users,especially those who are familiar with icons.Therefore,the purpose of this study is to explore the impact of icon style on young and familiar users and related factors.This study includes four experiments.The first experiment selected a single task of icon recognition to compare the cognitive performances between the two icons in low load condition and examine its related factors.The second experiment applied double tasks of icon recognition,the main task is icon recognition,and the secondary task is number reading,to investigate the difference of cognitive performances of the two icons in high load condition.The third experiment designed a single task of icon searching to explore the difference of the two icons in different load conditions.The last experiment is intended to know user preference and understandability of skeuomorphic and flat icons.For young and familiar users,it was found as follows:(1)Skeuomorphic icons consume more attention resources than flat icons.So the cognitive load of skeuomorphic icons is higher than that of flat icons.There is no significant difference in recognition performances between the two icons,but there are significant differences in search performances between them,the search performances of flat icons are significantly higher than that of skeuomorphic icons.(2)The abstraction level of icons has significant impact on the recognition performances of flat icons,the recognition performances of flat icons with low level of abstraction are higher than that of flat icons with high level of abstraction.(3)The expression form of icons has significant impact on the recognition performances of flat icons,the recognition performances of flat icons with light color background and dark color figure are higher than that of flat icons with dark color background and light color figure.(4)The number of icons has significant effects on the searching performances for two types of icons,there is a positive correlation between the number of icons and searching time both for the two styles of icons.(5)Text label has significant effects on the searching performances for two types of icons,the searching performances of icons with text is higher than that of non-text icons.(6)Under high-load condition,there is interaction between text label and icon style,text label has significant impact on the searching performances of skeuomorphic icons,but has no significant impact on that of flat icons.(7)Subjects consider skeuomorphic icons as easier to understand than flat icons,but prefer flat icons with light color background and dark color figure.For young and familiar users,it was concluded from this study that:the cognitive load of flat icons is lower than that of skeuomorphic icons,and the cognition performances of flat icons are higher than that of skeuomorphic icons;for flat icons,the abstract level and the expression form of icons have significant effects on the cognitive performances;text label has significantly effects on both skeuomorphic and flat icons,especially on skeuomorphic icons.