Analysis of the pattern for icon selection and relation to positive/negative actions in desktop applications

Abstract

The paper presents an experiment on selecting and identifying an icon in desktop applications. The aim of this work is to get more specific guidelines for improvement in the design of a natural user interface. By conducting an indirect survey and handling different tasks to users, the issues such as what usual patterns for overviewing an icon in desktop applications are, how these patterns change when a user has to make a decision on what icons must be selected, how the pattern for selecting the icon varies and what changes in selection time take place when a task is executed multiple times in a row have been considered. To examine the influence of decision making on icon selection, icon classification into the positive and negative ones has been employed. As users had no guidelines what a positive/negative icon was, the ability to analyze if the colour of the icon and a related type of action influenced the perception of the icon has been developed. The carried out research draws the basic patterns for overviewing the icon in desktop applications and proves that the colour of the icon or the related type of action cannot be used as a single property to indicate icon perception by users.