An Eye Tracking Research Of Warning Characteristic In Product Owner’s Manuals On The Impact Of The Information Processing

With the development of technology and progress of society,the likelihood of people exposed to danger increased while more products went into people’s daily life. With the improvement of people’s security requirements, Product safety use has become more more prominent, and should be solved. The importance of warning which in order to convey safety information has been standing out.Recently,the design and evaluation of warnings have attracted psychologists’ attention,applied research on warning design and evaluation has grown.Research has explored design,environmental,personal factors that influence warning effectiveness,and how they influence the information processing.Most of the previous researches focused on using product labels or signage as the medium of warning information,however, relatively little using carriers such as product owner’s manuals,installation instructions and service manuals.The warning effect of warning characters in product owner’s manuals is unclear.This research has adopted eye movement technique to study the influence of warning character on the information processing, which involves in two experiments.Experiment1was2(location:embedded within the text, at the bottom of the page of text)×2(icon:have, none) two factors within-subjects repeated-measure design. The experiment was devoted to explore the influence of the location of warning and warning icon on the eye movement of watching warning in product owner’s manuals. by using SMI eye tracker to record40participants’ eye movements when they looked through product owner’s manuals with warnings,a memory test was carried out after viewing the manuals.Results:The main effects of the waring location and icon were significant respectively.Entry time and dwell time of the warnings that embedded within the text was better than that of the warnings located at the bottom of the text. Compared with "no icon", warnings with borders was noticed earlier and the dewell was larger. Experiment2was2(location:embedded within the text, at the bottom of the page of text)×2(border:have, none) two factors within-subjects design.The experiment discussed the influence of the location of warning and warning border on the warning processing using the same method with experiment l.The result was:The main effects of the waring location and border were significant respectively.Compared with warnings located at the bottom of the text, warnings that embedded within the text was noticed earlier and the dewell was larger.The presence of border made the warning noticed earlier by subjects and the dwell time in warning became larger.The contusion were as follows:(1) Warning location affected the information processing.warning noticeability and the level of risk perceived increased when warning embedded within the text.(2) Consistent with previous study,warning icon effect presenced in product owner’s manuals.the presence of icon increased warning noticeability and the level of risk perceived.(3) Product owner’s manuals also has border effect.Compared to warning without border, warning noticeability and the level of risk perceived were higher when warning has border.