Abstracts Category : Other

Understanding the noticeability and distraction of interactive highlighting techniques

by Joshua Leung

Highlighting techniques are a diverse class of visual communication techniques that makeusers aware of salient information in a timely manner. Any visual effect can potentially beused and manipulated to create highlighting effects given the right context, making the designspace for highlighting techniques broad and rich. Although highlighting techniques area common and important part of user interfaces, there is a lack of understanding about howto select, apply, and control their effects for achieving the best results. For example, designersneed to balance some fundamental tradeoffs between ensuring that important/urgentinformation is able to capture the users attention (i.e. desired noticeability of a stimulus),while reducing the risk that the users attention is needlessly diverted away from their task(i.e. undesired distraction). However, the lack of understanding of how noticeability and distractionrelate to each other, along with not knowing how we can manipulate the techniquesto affect the balance between these complicates the design process.To address this knowledge gap, this thesis provides contributions in three key areas: 1) Astructured design framework for describing highlighting techniques in terms of their constructionand control; 2) An empirical method and two experiment protocols for measuringboth noticeability and distraction; and 3) Empirical data about the noticeability and distractioneffects of highlighting techniques.The first part of this thesis reviews current understanding of highlighting techniques, theireffects, prior methods of measuring those effects, and underlying human factors. It alsopresents our new structured design framework Parametric Control and Construction ofHighlights (PCCH) for describing highlighting techniques in a concise and objective way,using parameters to accurately specify highlighting technique configurations.The second part of this thesis presents an empirical method for measuring both noticeabilityand distraction. This method was validated by conducting two user studies. In the firstexperiment, participants performed an abstract visual search task where they had to quicklydrag a disk onto a cued target in the presence of 0/1/2 instances of four commonly-usedhighlighting techniques presented in different configurations. The second experiment wasa dual-attention task where participants performed a dot-following task while detecting theappearance of highlighting techniques (in the form of AnimatedWindowBorders). Task performance,eye tracking, and subjective experience data from these experiments are presentedand analysed. Noticeability and Distraction metrics were computed from Task Performancedata.