The Study Of Attention Processing Mechanism And Usability Test Of Anthropomorphic Icon In Web Pages

Anthropomorphic icon is one of the most common types in the design of web page icon.People usually personifies and humanizes the icon by adding elements like human expression,body movements,etc.to the icon in the design process,so that the icon becomes emotional,ideological or behavioral like people themselves.While users are browsing web pages,anthropomorphic icons will affect the users' perception process by influencing attention processing mechanism,and play a certain role in the efficiency and user experience.The previous studies of icons mainly focused on the graphic features of icons,few on other factors in icons.And the study of anthropomorphic icons is rare.At present,the researches about anthropomorphic icons mainly focus on anthropomorphic images of consumer brands.It is found that the anthropomorphic design can provide stronger perception ability,and has a certain impact on the cognitive fluency of consumers.However,the researchers have ignored the application of anthropomorphic icons in web pages,and there is a lack of empirical research on anthropomorphic icons in the previous studies,especially in the study of attention mechanism.In this study,we select different types of icons as experimental materials,with the help of classical experimental paradigm and eye tracking technology,we try to figure out the differences between anthropomorphic icons and other icons in attention processing mechanism and usability testing.Based on the research results,we are going to propose some effective and feasible suggestions for the design and application of anthropomorphic icons in web pages.This study is divided into three studies,including four experiments.The first study includes experiment 1 and experiment 2.In Experiment 1,we used dot probe paradigm to explore whether anthropomorphic icons would cause the specific attention bias compared with other types of icons;in Experiment 2,we used visual search paradigm to explore whether anthropomorphic icons show different visual search efficiency compared with other types of icons.The second study includes experiment 3.In experiment 3,eye movement tracking technology was used to explore the mechanism of eye movement when subjects looked at different types of icons.The last study includes Experiment 4.In experiment 4,eye movement tracking technology was used to test the usage performance of anthropomorphic icons and other types of icons in the simulated web pages.The results are as follows:(1)in the early stage of attention processing,compared with the text,anthropomorphic icons can cause attentional avoidance;in the later stage of attention processing,the subjects have attentional bias to the anthropomorphic icons.(2)The cognitive feature of anthropomorphic icons can have a positive impact on visual search efficiency,while the anthropomorphic feature has little impact on it.(3)In the anthropomorphic icons,anthropomorphic feature can improve the beauty of the icons,and has certain advantages in the user's subjective preference.The results presented in this paper can provide scientific suggestions for the application of anthropomorphic icon in web design.