An Evaluation of the Understandability of Public Domain Icons:Effects of Gender and Age

摘要：

　　Icons and symbols are often deployed in graphical user interfaces.It is commonly believed that icons add to the user friendliness of products.Developers have great trust in icon libraries and they are likely to use icons they understand themselves without verifying users understanding.Interfaces relying on icons that are misinterpreted can lead to erroneous operation.In this study a set of icons in the public domain was interpreted by 64 participants to assess how well general icons are understood.Of the 105 icons included only 67 were correctly identified by all the raters.The results confirm that some basic icons are universally known.However,nearly half of the icons where not identified by all.Recognition correlated with gender,as males were more likely to identify icons connected to masculine concepts and females were more likely to recognize icons connected to feminine concepts.Moreover,a positive correlation was found between the age of the participants and icons depicting ideas from the past versus timeless icons.The results thus support the practice of user testing of icons rather than relying on assumptions.

关键词： Icons context visual perception user interface

作者: Gerd Berget Frode Eika Sandnes

作者单位: Institute of Information Technology Oslo and Akershus University College of Applied Sciences Oslo,No Institute of Information Technology Oslo and Akershus University College of Applied Science Oslo,Nor

会议类型: 国际会议

会议名称: The 2014 ICME International Conference on Complex Medical Engineering (CME2014)ICME复合医学工程国际会议

会议地点: 台北

会议语种:英文

页码: 17-21,44

在线出版日期: 2014-06-26（万方平台首次上网日期，不代表论文的发表时间）