The influence of different style of icons on users’ visual search in touch screen interface

Abstract

Touch screen interface design directly affects user’s understanding and operation to interface. In human-computer interaction, users find the target icon by visual searching, so visual search is the most important process. There are many kinds of interface style in modern interface design. This paper take four different icon styles as research object: such as line style, Metro style, flat style and skeuomorphism style. By the eye movement experiment about visual research, we arrival at conclusions as follows: In visual search tasks, there is different efficiency in different icon styles; Users have the highest search efficiency in abstract icons such as line style icons and Metro style icons, second in flat icons, and the lowest in skeuomorphism icons. Finally we can conclude differences in visual search. Using the users’ visual search habits as interface design accordance, can improve user experience of human-machine interaction.