Publications

The effect of violating visual conventions of a website on user performance and disorientation. How bad can it be?
Santa-Maria, L. and Dyson, M.C.

Abstract

This experiment investigates what happens to user performance and disorientation when visual conventions of a genre are violated. It also looks at what happens to the user performance and disorientation over time. Twenty-eight participants were randomly allocated to two independent groups: one was tested with a conventional website and the other with a convention-violating website. The study comprised of two parts and on each part participants were tested on a different website. Results showed that in the first part participants who used the violating site performed worse and were more disoriented than participants who used the conventional version. But the performance of the participants of the convention-violating group improved over time so that by the end of the first part performance on both groups were equivalent. In the second part performance and disorientation on both groups were equivalent suggesting that users might rapidly adapt to visual convention violations.

Paper presented at the ACM SIGDOC'08 




Visual genre conventions and user performance on the web
Santa-Maria, L.

Abstract
    One problem which designers are faced with is whether they should follow existing conventions of a genre, or break with conventions, and innovate. Understanding the relationship between conventions and user performance is essential in order for designers to make informed decisions. Despite the fact that usability literature claims that not conforming to genre conventions can cause serious usability problems, there is not much empirical investigation on the topic.

    Through a review of the literature, a framework was defined which established genre conventions as having a visual, structural, linguistic and a functional component. This thesis examines the impact that violation of the visual conventions of a digital genre has on user performance. Web discussion forums were the category of websites chosen to be investigated because of the likelihood that they are a truly digital genre which is emerging. A survey was conducted to help establish the existing visual conventions in the genre and to help define the experimental material. A series of empirical studies were conducted to validate the experimental material and to measure the performance of users familiar and unfamiliar with the genre when using

conforming and non-conforming web pages.

    Results show that not conforming to visual conventions of a web forum genre results in poorer performance and disorientation of participants familiar with the genre. But results also indicate that this poorer performance and disorientation is short-lived and participants who use a non-conforming forum over a brief period of time are

able to improve their performance and feel less disoriented. Furthermore, participants who use the non-conforming forum page are able to maintain their performance improvement when using another non-conforming web forum. Results also show that performance varies depending on the conventionality of the website and whether the user is retrieving information from the interface or the content.

   Finally, an empirical study was conducted on conforming and non-conforming online news genre and the findings obtained in web forums were reproduced in this other web genre.

These results suggest that although not conforming to visual conventions can cause a decline in performance, the magnitude of the negative effect on user performance has not been thoroughly investigated in usability literature. The fact that users can quickly recover from problems caused by the violation of the visual conventions of a genre brings a new perspective to the negotiation between innovation and conventions. Furthermore, the results from the interaction between conventionality and the type of task users perform can help inform design decisions based on a task oriented approach. It also empowers designers to better consider when to conform and when to violate conventions, and thus better estimate what impact their decisions will have on the final users.

Ph.D thesis University of Reading, 2008