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Design preferences and cognitive styles: experimentation by automated website synthesis
Siu-Wai Leung1, John Lee, Chris Johnson
1School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh EH8 9AB, UK. siu@inf.ed.ac.uk.
Automated Experimentation
|July 4, 2012
Summary
Participants preferred graphical designs, but found tabular formats easier to interpret, especially those with lower visualization skills. This suggests a link between cognitive abilities and design preferences in web experiments.
Area of Science:
- Human-Computer Interaction
- Cognitive Science
- Web Design
Background:
- Investigates the interplay between user design preferences, rationale, and cognitive performance in web-based experiments.
- Employs computational synthesis to create web experiments, including materials, protocols, and cognitive tests.
- Utilizes a website synthesizer for on-the-fly design generation and exploration.
Purpose of the Study:
- To computationally synthesize web-based experiments to study relationships between design preference, rationale, and cognitive test performance.
- To enable participants to explore and select preferred website designs generated dynamically.
- To analyze the correlation between design choices, reasoning, and cognitive abilities.
Main Methods:
- Participants used interactive tools to explore tree and table visualizations of causality information.
- Preference ratings and rationale for design choices were collected.
- Cognitive tests assessed visualization and analogy-making skills, with data analyzed using non-parametric statistics (Wilcoxon, Kruskal-Wallis, Kendall correlation).
Main Results:
- A majority (41/64) of participants preferred graphical (tree) over tabular presentations.
- Tabular presentations were rated as easier to interpret, particularly by participants with lower scores in visualization and analogy-making tests.
- A discrepancy exists between design preference and perceived interpretability based on cognitive abilities.
Conclusions:
- Design preferences appear to be associated with specific cognitive abilities.
- Computational synthesis is crucial for the practical setup and acquisition of scientific results in such experiments.
- Findings suggest that cognitive factors influence the selection and evaluation of visual design elements in web interfaces.
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