Towards exploring web interface sign ontology: A user study

Abstract

The smallest elements of web user interface (UI) like navigation links, buttons, icons, labels, thumbnails, symbols, etc. are defined in this paper as interface signs.The term Ontology is referred to the set of concepts and skills a user should own in order to understand the meaning of an interface sign. Designer should aware of web interface sign ontology to design user-intuitive web interface signs to get an idea what kind of presupposed knowledge end users hold to interpret the web interface signs. The objective of this research is to reveal the set ontologies available in web UI and the complexity associated with different ontological signs to interpret the meaning of web interface sign from semiotics perspective. Towards achieving the research goals a user study was replicated with 26 participants. So far, a preliminary analysis has performed on 13 participants' data and reports the preliminary outcomes in this work-in-progress paper. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2013.