Rafal Michalski

Wroclaw University of Science and Technology | WUT · Faculty of Management

The article investigates how the various colors and color pairs used as grouping factors affect the visual search process and direct manipulation activities in the context of toolbar-like graphical panels. Red, green, and blue colors having the same perceptual distance in the CIELab space are used. The results demonstrate significant influence of t...

Abstract The main goal of this research was the analysis of persons’ attitudes toward digital graphical information regarding various types of smartphone’s virtual package designs. Sixty students from two different faculties were involved in the study. Both the faculty and gender effects were controlled. The packages were electronically presented t...

Visual inspection is used in many areas due to the potential high costs of inspection error such as injury, fatality, loss of expensive equipment, scrapped items, rework, or failure to procure repeat business. This study presents an application of hidden Markov models (HMM) to fixations’ sequences analysis during visual inspection of front panels i...

In this work, we propose a new method for modeling human reasoning about objects' similarities. We assume that similarity depends on perceived intensities of objects' attributes expressed by natural language expressions such as low, medium, and high. We show how to find the underlying structure of the matrix with intensities of objects' similaritie...

This article shows the possibilities of applying the concept of scattered plots in the process of constructing graphical interfaces. A special feature of the proposed approach is the use of linguistic variables represented by fuzzy sets and elements of fuzzy logic to stimulate the movement of virtual agents on the plane that represent interface com...

The purpose of the study is to learn about and analyze people’s preferences regarding two visual representations of the uncertainty of parameter estimates for decision makers. The research is related to the perception of fuzzy numbers represented classically by triangles and, more recently, in the form of specifically constructed vectors. In a seri...

The research examines the influence of digital visual product package presentations on perceived purchase willingness. Subjects pairwise compared the graphical stimuli displayed on a computer monitor. Gathered purchase willingness preference weights were calculated by means of the Analytic Hierarchy Process technique. Two studies focused on the pac...

In view of recent technological developments and new computational and graphical possibilities, scientists and practitioners have become increasingly interested in studying how data and information should be presented. For instance, in project management, it is now recommended to employ dashboards instead of traditional reports. It is also believed...

Product packaging has a great influence on customers’ decision-making and shapes purchase intentions. The graphic message is the crucial component of this impact. Digital presentations of goods are ubiquitous, therefore understanding how graphical features influence customer decisions is of enormous theoretical and practical importance. Despite the...

The digital presentation of a product is ubiquitous today. It appears in both online stores and outdoors in various types of displays. Thus, it is important to know as much as possible how such product demonstration should be designed. This study presents an experimental investigation of the impact of product packaging viewing perspective on the pu...

The article shows how the concept of linguistic patterns (LP) combined with expert knowledge can be used to model the dynamics of social groups. Linguistic expressions similar to natural language are the basis for generating virtual forces (VF) that govern the movements of the individual agent. Using logical sentences and providing the methodology...

Alternative fuel vehicles (AFVs) are an important element of sustainable development and electromobility. Even though the analysis of consumers’ preferences towards AFV has already been done in various countries, the point of view of consumers from the country representing Central and Eastern Europe was missing. Within our complex, two stages surve...

The paper proposes a new visualisation in the form of vectors of not-fully-known quantitative features. The proposal is put in the context of project defining and planning and the importance of visualisation for decision making. The new approach is empirically compared with the already known visualisation utilizing membership functions of triangula...

Głównym celem poznawczym przedstawionych badań jest określenie preferencji potencjalnych klientów w zakresie prostego przekazu reklamowego prezentowanego w postaci cyfrowych wersji ulotek. Dodatkowo ukazano od strony metodycznej możliwości i zasady wykorzystania badania okulograficznego do pomiaru reakcji wizualnej na prosty przekaz reklamowy. Wyko...

Zagadnienie sposobu projektowania przekazu marketingowego jest niezwykle ważne zarówno dla teoretyków, jak i dla praktyków zarządzania. Projekty charakteryzujące się wysoką jakością użytkową mogą mieć bezpośredni wpływ na skuteczność kampanii rekla-mowych. W przedstawionej pracy badano wpływ czynników graficznych projektu ulotki reklamowej na prefe...

Management of successful IT projects in a sustainable manner is influenced by numerous factors. Organizational awareness of the necessity of engaging all project stakeholders is an important is-sue that helps in meeting project sustainable development goals. While there are many studies on the success factors of IT software projects, there is still...

This research concerns the workplace design methodology, involving digital human models, that prevents work-related musculoskeletal disorders (WMSDs). We propose an approach that, in conjunction with one of the classic WMSD risk assessment methods, allows one to simplify simulations in a three-dimensional digital environment. Two real-life workstat...

W świecie szybkich i ciągłych zmian rozwój technologii informacyjnych (IT) jest jednym z głównych elementów wpływających na skuteczność i efektywność przedsiębiorstw. Pomimo bardzo dużych nakładów czasu, pieniędzy i zaangażowania w zarządzanie projektami w tym zakresie, wciąż dość często nie udaje się ich zakończyć sukcesem. Niepowodzenia te powodu...

The knowledge on how to present visual content in an ergonomic way is crucial in various fields, especially in a current highly digitized world. The current study investigates how various digital presentations of a high-involvement product influence perceived purchase willingness. Undergraduate students performed a series of pairwise comparisons of...

Two simulation experiments were conducted to verify whether the idea of virtual force scatter plot algorithm, used for searching solutions of the facility layout problems, may be used as an input to the classical CRAFT and simulated annealing (SA) algorithms. The proposed approach employs a regular grid for specifying possible locations of objects....

The study shows the application of hidden Markov models (HMMs) for the analysis of eye ball movement fixations. The registered visual activity concerns pairwise comparisons of simple advertisement leaflets, differed in their layout orientation and captions’ styles. A simulation experiment was conducted to specify the most appropriate HMMs in terms...

The research demonstrates the use of hidden Markov models (HMMs) in analyzing fixation data recorded by an eye-tracker. The visual activity was registered while performing pairwise comparisons of simple marketing messages. The marketing information was presented in a form of digital leaflets appearing on a computer screen and differed in the compon...

Information on how to present visual content in an ergonomic way is crucial in various fields. The current study examines how the gender, race of a person, and picture-slogan relative location influence subjects’ perceived effectiveness about a social advertisement. Relative scores of 45 participants from Wrocław University of Science and Technolog...

Using questionnaires for eliciting data from respondents has a long term history. The present paper focuses on subjects’ preferences towards specific self-administered questionnaire designs and circumstances in which these experiments are carried out. The paper examines three factors, that is, the assistant presence (yes, no), survey form (paper or...

The paper presents simulation experiment results regarding properties of linguistic pattern based simulated annealing used for solving the facilities layout problems in logistics. In the article, we investigate four different arrangements (02 × 18, 03 × 12, 04 × 09, and 06 × 06) comprising of 36 items. The examined layouts also differ in the links...

This paper presents research concerned with how people perceive and subjectively assess various digital signage messages consisting of a simple image and one word text. Three independent factors were manipulated including: the background color (white and black), the text font size (36 and 72 points), and, finally, the image location (to the left an...

This research is focused on determining the relative importances of diverse work dimensions and their attributes in a large company producing transportation vehicles. Fifty four employees from three different departments took part in this examination. They were all males with significant work experience in the current post and overall in the compan...

The Subjective Overall Workload Assessment (SOWA) is a tool for overall evaluation of workload. It takes into account the work environment, both static and dynamic workload as well as mental workload. The method allows to identify the dimensions and factors having the greatest influence on the workload. Its huge advantage is an internal consistency...

The paper presents an application of Hidden Markov Models (HMM) to fixations’ sequences analysis. The examination concerns eye tracking data gathered during performing simple comparison and decision tasks for four versions of plain control panels. The panels displayed the target and current velocity either on a digital or analog (clock-face) speedo...

Various designs of typical digital control panels were experimentally analyzed from both the effectiveness and efficiency point of view. Subjects performed information comparison tasks aimed at keeping the vehicle velocity at the same level. The experiment involved two versions of speedometers for displaying current and target velocities (clock–fac...

Artykuł prezentuje i omawia wyniki dwóch eksperymentów symulacyjnych. Pierwszy z nich dotyczy wpływu wartości siły jednostkowej algorytmu sił wirtualnych na jakość roz-wiązań wykorzystywanych następnie jako wejście do algorytmu CRAFT operującego na siatce regularnej w procesie optymalizacji rozmieszczania obiektów (Facility Layout). Ana-liza przepr...

W artykule przedstawiono próbę zastosowania stochastycznych modeli Markowa z ukrytymi stanami do analizy aktywności wzrokowej człowieka. Dane wejściowe do eksperymentalnych badań symulacyjnych zgromadzono podczas eksperymentu polegającego na porównywaniu parami różnych wariantów wirtualnych opakowań produktów. Symulacje polegające na wielokrotnej e...

Various versions of a typical control panels are experimentally analyzed both from the effectiveness and efficiency point of view. The stimuli differed in objects' locations within a panel, and the type of the expected response to the presented stimuli. The results of users' performance are investigated using classical analyses of variance. Moreove...

The presented study explores diverse ways of demonstrating the product in a digital way, e.g. in big digital outdoor telebims, monitors situated in supermarkets or electronic shops available on the Internet. Three different factors were examined in a laboratory based experiment: product presentation background colors (red, green, and blue), present...

The paper presents results of the experimental investigation based on the eye tracking data regarding the pairwise comparisons of box package designs. Persons taking part in the study were asked to visually analyze and express their perceived purchase intentions towards various types of product packages. During the whole process subjects’ visual ac...

This paper describes a concept of computer software devoted to flexible modeling and solving facilities layout (FL) problems in logistics systems. In the beginning, a brief review of available approaches in this regard is provided. Next, diverse aspects of flexibility in designing FL are identified in the literature and discussed. These considerati...

This study demonstrates a simulation experiment results regarding a flexible approach to solving facilities layout problem on a regular grid. In this paper approach we model objects with different dimensions and various shapes. We have implemented our version of the simulated annealing algorithm [5] and analyzed how the number of cycles (100, 200,...

The usability of information conveyance is influenced by various factors. It has already been confirmed that verbal stimuli to be more effective should be presented on the right-hand side while non-verbal stimuli on the left-hand side. The aim of this paper is to analyze the impact of three factors: the race, gender and location of the human model...

The main goal of this research is to examine the influence of various control panel background colors and geometrical layouts on users’ subjective perceptions. We investigated five different colors including red, green, blue, white and grey as well as two different arrangements of the panel’s informative and controlling items. In the latter case, m...

The paper presents comparative investigation of the effectiveness of three algorithms used for optimizing control panel objects’ arrangements. We examined two modified classical approaches involving changing of objects’ pairs, that is CRAFT, and its simplified version as well as our implementation of the Simulated annealing concept. Their behavior...

The paper tries to answer the question regarding the nature of the statistical distribution of data gathered by eye tracking software. The experimental data regarding typical search tasks performed while using web sites were formally analysed and discussed. Results show some resemblance of the obtained experimental distributions of distance travell...

Researchers employed digital manikins to determine the space necessary in an emergency-medical-service helicopter to effectively and efficiently conduct life-saving medical procedures. To simulate resuscitation with appropriate digital human models, they used Anthropos ErgoMAX modeling software in the 3D Studio Max environment.

A simulation experiment was conducted to verify whether the Link scatter plot algorithm (Grobelny, 1999) used for searching solutions of the facility layout problems may be used as an input to the classical CRAFT algorithm (Buffa et al., 1964) which employs a regular grid for specifying possible locations of objects. Three independent variables wer...

The presented research deals with the effects of web page design influencing the usability measured both objectively as well as subjectively. The examined factors included the background color, the number of local navigation hyperlinks, and the proportion of graphics in relation to the text on the html page. The obtained typical task execution time...

The problem of objects’ arrangement appears often during the design process of the workplace environment. The quality of the solution may significantly influence the effectiveness and efficiency of manufacturing. Therefore, this issue gains much attention of building planners (architects, industrial engineers) as well as operations research scienti...

The presented research deals with the effects of web page design influencing the usability measured both objectively as well as subjectively. The examined factors included the background color, the number of local navigation hyperlinks, and the proportion of graphics in relation to the text on the html page. The obtained typical task execution time...

The main purpose of this study was to investigate the nature of preferences and their relation to the objective measures in simple direct manipulation tasks involving both the cognitive process as well as the visually guided pointing activities. The conducted experiment was concerned with the graphical structures resembling toolbars widely used in...

This article is concerned with various ways of analyzing the subjective assessment of displaying digital signage content. In the beginning, the brief description of the signage system evolution is described; next, the carried out experiment is depicted. The preferences of the 32 subjects were obtained using pairwise comparisons of the designed scre...

Subjective assessment of the workload and digital human modelling.

Generally, the obtained results showed that the panel location and target item size factors considerably influenced the mean acquisition times. The gender effect was not meaningful, but the interaction between the gender and panel location was statistically significant. 4.1 Panel location The results showed that the panel location factor considerab...

In this paper, results of experimental research on the preattentive mechanism in the human–computer interaction (HCI) were presented. Fifty-four subjects were asked to find interface elements from various panel structures. The arrangements were differentiated by their orientation (vertical, horizontal), colour pattern (ordered, unordered) and objec...

In the paper Subjective Overall Workload Assessment (SOWA) method was proposed and described. A computer information system supporting the process of generating appropriate assessment questionnaires and speeding up the analysis of collected data was presented. Next, the SOWA was practically applied for assessing the subjective workload of persons e...

The main objective of this paper was to investigate the effects of a computer screen interface design and its related geometrical characteristics of 36 graphical objects on a user's task efficiency. A total of 490 subjects took part in laboratory experiments that focused on the direct manipulation of a visual dialogue between a user and a computer....

The paper present a review of information system usability assurance approaches. The author describes a historical development of software production models and divides them into two main groups. The first one, named classical, included fundamental computer program life cycles derived from software engineering. Waterfall, spiral and rapid applicati...