An Experimental Study on Visual Search Factors of Information Features in a Task Monitoring Interface

• Published in: Human-Computer Interaction: Users and Contexts pp. 525 - 536
• Main Authors: Wu, Xiaoli, Xue, Chengqi, Zhou, Feng
• Format: Book Chapter
• Language: English
• Published: Cham Springer International Publishing 2015
• Series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science
• Subjects: Factors; Information features; Information interface; Task monitoring; Visual search
• ISBN: 331921005X; 9783319210056
• ISSN: 0302-9743; 1611-3349
• DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-21006-3_50

This paper carries out an experimental study on eye movement tracking when performing different visual searching tasks on a task monitoring interface, from the perspective of psychometrics. Behavior and physiological reaction data have been obtained through experiments - firstly in a scenario where no visual searching task is requested, and secondly within three separate tasks where the subjects are asked to search for enemy information, threat information and data information, respectively. Eye movement data indexes in nine areas of the task monitoring interface have been analyzed for each task based on a division of the different task monitoring areas. The experiments demonstrate that the search path followed by subjects on the task monitoring interface show significantly different subject reaction times and eye movements when undergoing each different task, as the search path is influenced by task-driven cognitive information processing and information search time. Fixation duration, duration count and visit count also show significant differences in each different monitor area; there-fore information features distributed in the radar sub-interface can be easily captured, which have been proven to be related to task-driven automatic capture. In-formation position and features such as colors, shapes and sizes have a significant impact on visual searches as they can easily cause problems with information omission, misreading and misjudgment, missing/ignoring data etc. when under-going each different task. The paper concludes that monitoring tasks and the individual information features within in an interface have a great influence on the visual search, which will guide further research on design of information features in task monitoring interfaces.