Conference Paper

A User-Oriented Test of Icons in an Educational Software Product.

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... One solution to this problem could be redesigning the visual components of the GUI using universal design principles so they could be equally accessed by both colourblind users as well as users with normal colour vision. An icon is one such visual component that affects a computer interface's usability according to its appropriateness, communicating the intended meaning and its recognizability (Fullerton and Happ, 1993). With advancements in graphic technology, the focus of GUI designers had shifted towards bringing aesthetic appeal to the icons by using complex and detailed graphics to make the icons appear more realistic, thereby neglecting the issues faced by vision deficient users such as colourblinds. ...
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With evolution of Graphical User Interface, the access to the computer interface was expanded to cater to the extreme user categories by providing accessibility features and making the computer interface more inclusive. One such extreme user category is colourblind, which has a special accessibility requirement from the GUI. This paper studies the iconography of the Microsoft Windows operating system interface with an objective to develop an inclusive icon design solution that is visually ergonomic for colourblind users to include them as a mainstream user category in a computer interface.
... Often, the real question is whether users find the set of all icons in a product appropriate and discriminable. When this is the case, methods used by Lewis (1993a), Fullerton and Happ (1993), or Lin (1992) should be considered. ...
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Voice navigation systems allow users to interact with computer applications by voice. In this paper we present human factors research that evaluated design alternatives for major user interface components. In the first study we evaluated the appropriateness and discriminability of four sets of icons that were candidates for functions in theVoice Toolbar of the navigation system. In the second study we studied two different ways of organizing and presenting voice commands in theWhat Can I Say window. The key finding was that the alternative organization seemed to improve task performance. The results provided the basis for design recommendations.
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The primary objective of this study is to evaluate two methods for assessing the quality of iconic representations of computer functionality. A secondary objective is to explore the relationship between frequency of use of specific computer functions and icon usage. These objectives were accomplished by investigating the identifiability, perceived effectiveness, and frequency of use of 34 icons used in the standard and formatting toolbars of Microsoft Word 7.0. More specifically, our data provide information regarding the perceived effectiveness of the iconic representation given its associated functionality, free-form recall of associated functionality given only the icon, frequency of use of the functionality (either by access through the icon or the menu) and frequency of icon use. To accomplish our objectives, we constructed and administered a four-part survey to 353 volunteers. The results compose the first empirically documented evidence that icon use is not merely a function of how frequently users access the functionality the icon is designed to represent. The results also suggests that the ability of users to correctly identify the functionality of an icon given only the graphic image may be an effective method of evaluating the quality of alternative icon designs.
Conference Paper
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Icons are used in almost every graphical user-interface to computer software. Despite this, there is a serious lack of comprehension of what they are and how they work. The application of semiotics to user-interface icons can help to solve this problem by providing a framework for understanding icons in. This paper suggests such a semiotic approach and then applies it to real-world icons to show its effectiveness. Some hypothetical guidelines are derived from the application and a strong analytic technique results.
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