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-- Namatame, M., Kitajima, M., & Nishizaki, Y. (2007)Namatame, M., Kitajima, M., & Nishizaki, Y. (2007). Utility of Labeled Pictograms for Improving Performance in Directory-Based Information Search Tasks at E-Commerce Sites. Proceedings of the IADIS e-Commerce 2007 conference, 251-255.
Utility of Labeled Pictograms for Improving Performance in Directory-Based Information Search Tasks at E-Commerce SitesThis paper reports an experiment conducted to compare alternative representations of directories for improving usability of e-commerce sites. The experiment simulated a directory-based information search task, typically carried out at eshopping sites, to understand how it is performed when directories are represented in text, labeled pictograms, or unlabeled pictograms. We conjectured that the task performance would be affected by skills in processing text or images including pictograms. Twenty-one hard-of-hearing, who were skilled at processing pictograms, and 21 hearing participants, skilled at processing text, were asked to select one of 27 directories represented in one of the three alternative formats for each of 38 queries ranging from easy to difficult. The result demonstrated that it took more time to select a directory for the difficult queries than for the easy queries and that it took the least time when the directories were represented in labeled pictograms. In addition, the degree of variability in directories selected by each of the participant groups was greater for the difficult queries than for the easy queries and decreased monotonically for the hearing group as the format became more textual. However, it stayed approximately at the same level for the hard-of-hearing group. On the assumption that the degree of directory utility increases as the time to answer a query and the variability of the answers decrease, labeled-pictogram representation is the best except when easy queries were answered by hearing persons. Download
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