Investigation of potential industrial uses for tools assessing saliency and clutter of design features

Abstract

As human interaction with digital displays becomes an indispensable part of everyday life, user Interface (UI) design is becoming an increasingly important field. There is a great demand in industry for tools to aid designers in UI design, and in response to this need, a perceptual tool, DesignEye, has been developed. DesignEye creates maps of saliency and clutter within an image, which can be used by designers to find problem areas in a design. The experiment described here tested how subjects differ in their analysis of existing UT designs when they have also been given access to maps from DesignEye. Subjects were asked to evaluate existing designs in Ford vehicles for three conditions: (i) while being given no assistance, (ii) while being asked to use a design technique like squinting, and (iii) while being asked to use DesignEye output. It was found that subjects did not substantially differ in their analysis when given a perceptual tool. However, due to the backgrounds of the subjects tested and the experimental setup and environment, further testing is necessary to determine how DesignEye might change the way designers analyze designs, build consensus within teams, and objectively rate potential design options.