Using icons to find documents: simplicity is critical
INTERCHI '93 Proceedings of the INTERCHI '93 conference on Human factors in computing systems
International Journal of Man-Machine Studies
Navigation strategies with ecological displays
International Journal of Human-Computer Studies
Visual search and mouse-pointing in labeled versus unlabeled two-dimensional visual hierarchies
ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction (TOCHI)
The human-computer interaction handbook
An integrated model of eye movements and visual encoding
Cognitive Systems Research
Modeling icon search in ACT-R/PM
Cognitive Systems Research
Proceedings of the 7th international ACM SIGACCESS conference on Computers and accessibility
Dynamic detection of novice vs. skilled use without a task model
Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
The adaptation of visual search strategy to expected information gain
Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
The effects of menu parallelism on visual search and selection
AUIC '08 Proceedings of the ninth conference on Australasian user interface - Volume 76
Human-Computer Interaction
Simulating Perceptive Processes of Pilots to Support System Design
INTERACT '09 Proceedings of the 12th IFIP TC 13 International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction: Part I
Improving document icon to re-find efficiently what you need
HCI'07 Proceedings of the 12th international conference on Human-computer interaction: interaction platforms and techniques
Visual search on a mobile device while walking
MobileHCI '12 Proceedings of the 14th international conference on Human-computer interaction with mobile devices and services
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Users of modern GUIs routinely engage in visual searches for various control items, such as buttons and icons. Because this is so ubiquitous, it is important that the visual properties of user interfaces support such searches. The current research is aimed at deepening our understanding of how the visual spacing between icons affects visual search times. We constructed an experiment based on previous icon sets [8] where spacing between icons was systematically manipulated, and for which we had a computational cognitive model that predicted performance. In particular, the model predicted that larger spacing would lead to slower search times. While this prediction was borne out, there was an unanticipated finding: users in this new experiment were substantially slower than in previous similar experiments with smaller spacing. In fact, results from this new experiment were better fit with a model that employed a fundamentally different, and less efficient, search strategy. A second experiment was conducted to explicitly test the surprising result that this varied and larger icon spacing would lead to increased search times. Results were consistent with this hypothesis. These results imply that while small differences in visual layout may not intrinsically produce large differences in user performance, they may cause users to adopt suboptimal strategies that do produce such differences.