Abstract:

The existing researches do not consider the effect of icon consistency adequately. Aiming at this problem, the within-subject experimental design is adopted to study the effect of icons consistency on its recognition efficiency and reliability. It contains five experiments. Experiment 1 establishes the relationship between icon forms and the represented functions (to establish user’s mental model); experiment 2 investigates the effect of consistency of icons appearance/form; experiment 3 investigates the effect of consistency of function key position; experiment 4 and experiment 5 investigates the effect of consistency of matching of icon appearance/form and function/semanteme. The results of ChiSquare test on error rate differences among five experiments are “experiment 4＞experiment 5=experiment 3=experiment 2=experiment 1”; oneway ANOVA (analysis of variance) results on reaction time differences are “experiment 5=experiment 4＞experiment 3=experiment 2=experiment 1”. Conclusion: The matching of appearance/form and function/semanteme is the core of interface consistency. Positive transfer of learning exists in recognition of similar icons appearance/form with represented original function/semanteme; for consistent icons appearance/form with inconsistent or converse represented function/semanteme, it results in negative transfer of learning due to conflict of mental model, which shows as the reduction of recognition efficiency and reliability.

Key words: human-computer interface;consistency;recognition efficiency;reliability;mental model