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Title:
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UTILITY OF LABELED PICTOGRAMS FOR IMPROVING PERFORMANCE IN DIRECTORY-BASED INFORMATION SEARCH TASKS AT E-COMMERCE SITES |
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Author(s):
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Miki Namatame , Muneo Kitajima , Yukiko Nishizaki |
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ISBN:
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978-972-8924-49-2 |
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Editors:
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Piet Kommers and Pedro Isaías |
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Year:
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2007 |
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Edition:
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Single |
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Keywords:
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Web Usability, Representation of Directory, Labeled-Pictogram, Directory-Based Information Search |
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Type:
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Short Paper |
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First Page:
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251 |
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Last Page:
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255 |
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Language:
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English |
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Cover:
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Full Contents:
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click to dowload 
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Paper Abstract:
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This 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. |
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