Research Of Design Elements Based On Cognitive Friction

As the pace of technological change accelerates exponentially,the number of smaller,cheaper,and more powerful chips that are embedded in modern products,such as household appliances and vehicles,keeps increasing.Compared to purely mechanical products,electronic or electromechanical products have even more significantly impacted human life.One reason is that these products exceed some human's abilities such as memory,the speed of operation and information storage.But,since these aspects are invisible to the user,product appearance is what incites that user to purchase the product.For a designer,the appearance instead,serves the role of "package","wrapping",and user interface.The relationship between"form and structure" and "function" is thus weakened.As a result,users experience difficulties using such products.This trend is increasing with the development of technology.In other words,the distance,or what can be called"cognitive gap",between the users' understanding of how to use a product and how the designer designed the product to be used,especially if it has multiple functions,widens.Thus,the users do not know how to interact with the product or are confused and possibly apprehensive when they see it.Worse,this can lead to people having a bad experience with a product they purchased and to reject technology.This phenomenon is defined by Alan Cooper(Cooper,1999)as "Cognitive Friction(CF)".Therefore,how to display the product's information to users is a big challenge in industrial design,presently.The aims of this dissertation are to find out a systematic theory that can guide and mitigate the issue of cognitive friction between user and product in the process of designing.Meanwhile,this can enrich our understanding about the theory of cognitive friction.This topic focuses on the following research:the research of theory itself,measuring its index,reducing the coefficient and developing an online aiding designing tool based on affordance.In order to deal with these issues and try to address the main research question,this study unifies the advantages of the time resolution of ERP and some achievements from other fields,such as the cognitive mode that from cognitive psychology and affordance that from ecological psychology.We aim to make sure users would interact with products smoothly and get rid of their frustration while they interacting with products.The contributions are as follows:1.Theoretical.A theoretical framework for cognitive friction is built.It includes as follows:clarifying the concept of CF by comparing with other confusing concepts,its characteristics,and the various causes of CF are listed.Besides,ERP is used to measure the two vital dimensions of CF.ERP provides a new insight into the nature of this theory and the time course of the interaction between the two dimensions.2.Technical and methodological.From the perspective of product's image,we take the lead in using the ERP to explore the CF's index based on different matching level.The different design elements,such as color and shape,are used as experimental samples and the component N400,P200 were discovered that can be as the index to evaluate the cognitive friction.Besides,the P200 was dominated by affordance.3.To control the difference between user model and conceptual model,the research of cognitive friction reduction was carried out.Based on the prototype theory,the tool was used to judge which kind of design coding had a higher matching level with the visual pattern.According to this result,the model of visual cognition was decomposed,extracted and then clarify some visual cognition modeling that oriented in the interface.Finally,we proposed guidelines that would help designersto optimize solutions according to the principle of modeling.4.To help users to detect the action possibility easily and make sure the design model could match the users' concept model,a design tool that evolves products form is developed with CEDAR Group from Clemson University.ABIGA(Affordance Based Interactive Genetic Algorithm)combines the concept of affordances and the improved Archive-based Micro Genetic Algorithm(AMGA2).The input of the tool is the set of design parameters of a product.Users provide evaluations of affordance-quality of the product.The genetic algorithm optimizes the solutions based on the input of the users.This tool can help us conveniently involve end-users and attain fast product improvement.