Sarah Isherwood

Icon Identification in Context: The Changing Role of Icon Characteristics With User Experience:

Objective: This research examined the relative importance of icon characteristics in determining the speed and accuracy of icon identification. Background: Studies to date have focused on the role of one or two icon characteristics when users first experience an icon set. This means that little is known about the relative importance of icon characteristics or how the role of icon characteristics might change as users gain experience with icons. Methods: Thirty participants carried out an icon identification task over a long series of trials to simulate learning through experience. Icon characteristics investigated included semantic distance, concreteness, familiarity, and visual complexity. Results: Icon characteristics were major determinants of performance, accounting for up to 69% of the variance observed in performance. However, the importance of icon characteristics changed with experience: Semantic distance is crucial initially while icon-function relationships are learned, but familiarity is important later because it has lasting effects on access to long-term memory representations. Conclusion: These findings suggest that icon concreteness may not be of primary importance when identifying icons and that semantic distance and familiarity may be more important. Application: Designers need to take into account icon characteristics other than concreteness when creating icons, particularly semantic distance and familiarity. The precise importance of the latter characteristics will vary depending on whether icons are rarely encountered or frequently used.

What’s in a name? The role of graphics, functions, and their interrelationships in icon identification

Communication using icons is now commonplace. It is therefore important to understand the processes involved in icon comprehension and the stimulus cues that individuals utilize to facilitate identification. In this study, we examined predictors of icon identification as participants gained experience with icons over a series of learning trials. A dynamic pattern of findings emerged in which the primary predictors of identification changed as learning progressed. In early learning trials, semantic distance (the closeness of the relationship between icon and function) was the best predictor of performance, accounting for up to 55% of the variance observed, whereas familiarity with the function was more important in later trials. Other stimulus characteristics, such as our familiarity with the graphic in the icon and its concreteness, were also found to be important for icon design. The theoretical implications of these findings are discussed, with particular emphasis on the parallels with picture naming. The icon identification norms from this study may be downloaded from brm.psychonomic-journals .org/content/supplemental.

Auditory Displays as Occasion Setters

Objective: The aim of this study was to evaluate whether representational sounds that capture the richness of experience of a collision enhance performance in braking to avoid a collision relative to other forms of warnings in a driving simulator. Background: There is increasing interest in auditory warnings that are informative about their referents. But as well as providing information about some intended object, warnings may be designed to set the occasion for a rich body of information about the outcomes of behavior in a particular context. These richly informative warnings may offer performance advantages, as they may be rapidly processed by users. Method: An auditory occasion setter for a collision (a recording of screeching brakes indicating imminent collision) was compared with two other auditory warnings (an abstract and an “environmental” sound), a speech message, a visual display, and no warning in a fixed-base driving simulator as interfaces to a collision avoidance system. The main measure was braking response times at each of two headways (1.5 s and 3 s) to a lead vehicle. Results: The occasion setter demonstrated statistically significantly faster braking responses at each headway in 8 out of 10 comparisons (with braking responses equally fast to the abstract warning at 1.5 s and the environmental warning at 3 s). Conclusion: Auditory displays that set the occasion for an outcome in a particular setting and for particular behaviors may offer small but critical performance enhancements in time-critical applications. Application: The occasion setter could be applied in settings where speed of response by users is of the essence.

Balance appointment information leaflets: employing performance-based user-testing to improve understanding.

Abstract Objective: To use performance-based user-testing to evaluate the effectiveness of balance appointment patient information leaflets (PILs) in conveying important information. Design: The study used a sequential groups design. Twenty participants were asked to find and demonstrate understanding of 11 key points of information contained within two NHS leaflets, A and B (10 participants each), through individual structured-interviews. Participants’ views of the leaflets were explored through a short semi-structured interview. Following analysis, a revised leaflet was developed and tested on a further 20 participants. Study sample: 40 participants (25F/15M, aged 46–72) with no experience of balance problems or balance assessment appointments. Results: Participants exhibited difficulties with finding and/or understanding 5/11 and 6/11 points of information within leaflets A and B, respectively. Five out of eleven points of the revised leaflet also posed problems. Ten out of eleven points were understood by > 90% of participants testing the revised leaflet compared with 6/11 points for leaflets A and B. Conclusions: Some balance appointment PILs contain information which is difficult to find and/or understand for some readers. PILs should be evaluated prior to use using performance-based methods, since poor information provision may lead to increased patient anxiety and appointment non-attendance, cancellation, or postponement.

The effect of auditory distraction on the useful field of view in hearing impaired individuals and its implications for driving

This study assessed whether the increased demand of listening in hearing impaired individuals exacerbates the detrimental impact of auditory distraction on a visual task (useful field of view test), relative to normally hearing listeners. Auditory distraction negatively affects this visual task, which is linked with various driving performance outcomes. Hearing impaired and normally hearing participants performed useful field of view testing with and without a simultaneous listening task. They also undertook a cognitive test battery. For all participants, performing the visual and auditory tasks together reduced performance on each respective test. For a number of subtests, hearing impaired participants showed poorer visual task performance, though not to a statistically significant extent. Hearing impaired participants were significantly poorer at a reading span task than normally hearing participants and tended to score lower on the most visually complex subtest of the visual task in the absence of auditory task engagement. Useful field of view performance is negatively affected by auditory distraction, and hearing loss may present further problems, given the reductions in visual and cognitive task performance suggested in this study. Suggestions are made for future work to extend this study, given the practical importance of the findings.

Semantic congruency of auditory warnings

Abstract The aim of this study was to explore operator experience and performance for semantically congruent and incongruent auditory icons and abstract alarm sounds. It was expected that performance advantages for congruent sounds would be present initially but would reduce over time for both alarm types. Twenty-four participants (12M/12F) were placed into auditory icon or abstract alarm groupings. For each group both congruent and incongruent alarms were used to represent different driving task scenarios. Once sounded, participants were required to respond to each alarm by selecting a corresponding driving scenario. User performance for all sound types improved over time, however even with experience a decrement in speed of response remained for the incongruent iconic sounds and in accuracy of performance for the abstract warning sounds when compared to the congruent auditory icons. Semantic congruency was found to be of more importance for auditory icons than for abstract sounds. Practitioner Summary: Alarms are used in many operating systems as emergency, alerting, or continuous monitoring signals for instance. This study found that the type and representativeness of an auditory warning will influence operator performance over time. Semantically congruent iconic sounds produced performance advantages over both incongruent iconic sounds and abstract warnings.

The Use of Multimodal Representation in Icon Interpretation

Identifying icon functions differs from naming pictures in that strong semantic links between pictures and their names have been formed over a long period of time whereas the meaning of icons has often to be learned. This paper examines roles of icon characteristics such as complexity, concreteness, familiarity and aesthetic appeal in determining how easily icons can be learned and identified. The role of these characteristics is seen as dynamic, changing as the user learns the icon set. It is argued that the way in which users learn icon meanings is similar to the processes involved in language learning. Icon meanings are learned by drawing on rich multimodal representations which are the result of our world experience. This approach could lead to a better understanding of how multimodal information can be most usefully presented on interfaces.