More predictability in creating aesthetically appealing websites can be obtained using universal design principles, such as MAYA (Most Advanced, Yet Acceptable). The MAYA principle highlights the importance of both novelty and typicality in aesthetic appeal. While its effect has been empirically demonstrated in various contexts, it has not been examined for websites. Survey participants (N = 108) evaluated novelty, typicality, and aesthetic appeal across six commercial and six service websites. The results of a linear mixed-effects model indicate that both novelty and typicality predict website aesthetic appeal, supporting the MAYA principle. However, the connection between novelty and aesthetic appeal is stronger than between typicality and aesthetic appeal. Higher novelty predicts higher aesthetic appeal, particularly for service websites, whereas typicality has a stronger effect on commercial websites. These results explain how the MAYA principle applies to website design and help designers enhance the predictability of creating aesthetically appealing websites.

• 120 icons’ semantic distance (SD) and aesthetic appeal (AA) were assessed. • Strongest predictors were concreteness for SD and icon style familiarity for AA. • SD and AA have only a tiny inverse association when controlling for other factors. • The aesthetic-usability effect seems to be very weak in icons. • Familiarity might be the strongest factor for aesthetic-usability effect in icons. The aesthetic-usability effect asserts a positive relationship between icons’ aesthetic appeal and usability, but the strength and direction of the effect are still under debate. In user interfaces, icons are key components for fluent HCI, with their usability depending on semantic distance. Although previous studies have investigated factors influencing icon cognition, the relationship between aesthetic appeal and perceived usability remains unclear, especially when controlling icon concreteness and other influencing factors. Here, we study the relationship of aesthetic appeal (AA) of icons to their semantic distance (SD), with a particular focus on icons varying in concreteness. We also investigate how strong this effect is compared to other factors, such as familiarity. We conducted a behavioral experiment ( N = 46) to assess AA of icons while measuring their SD as response times in icon-function semantic matching task. We employed generalized linear mixed-effects models to analyze the relationships between the variables. Our findings indicate that icon concreteness was the strongest predictor of SD (weak effect), whereas familiarity with the icon style was the strongest predictor of AA (moderate effect). This suggests that the aesthetic-usability effect is weak for icons when controlling for other factors. While aesthetics can influence usability and vice versa, other confounding variables such as familiarity and concreteness appear to play a greater role. Particularly, familiarity with icon style may be the strongest explanatory factor for the apparent aesthetic-usability effect in icons. Our study provides insights into how inter-individual and contextual factors shape the complex relationship between icon aesthetics and usability.

Existing measurements of driver distraction in laboratory settings lack construct and ecological validity, and therefore, cannot provide reliable estimates of in-car tasks’ distraction effects. In this paper, we operationalize driver distraction in a novel way with the help of Drive-In Lab, where any passenger car can be connected to a driving simulation. The operationalization is based on drivers’ headway maintenance during in-car tasks as compared to baseline driving, while accommodating situational and driver-specific variables, such as brake response times. Realistic visual looming cues enable evaluation of distraction effects on cognitive processes crucial for safe driving. Validation studies with two 2024 car models indicate that the method can reliably differentiate distraction effects between cars, in-car tasks, and drivers as large, medium, small, or no effect on crash potential. The method supports design of in-car interactions by providing valid means to reveal the worst and best practices in in-car user interface design.

Driver distraction by smartphone use is a major contributor in traffic accidents. Context-sensitive driver (in)attention monitoring and warning systems might mitigate the associated risks. However, few naturalistic studies are yet available on the effects of such systems. In this paper, utility of context-sensitivity in inattention monitoring was studied by a smartphone-based context-sensitive distraction warning system. The warnings were based on driver's phone use and the attentional demands of the upcoming traffic environment. The system's effects on 26 heavy smartphone users’ phone usage and acceptance were analyzed after a within-subject naturalistic study with 12 weeks of control (warnings off) and 12 weeks of interventions (warnings on). The system decreased odds that the drivers would touch their smartphones in reminder areas that were defined a priori as high demanding for attention. Against expectations, the system had no effect in urban road environments. The drivers reported that they had paid more attention to traffic because of the system and that the warnings were acceptable and useful, even if annoying. Similar systems’ safety effects should be further studied. No eye-tracking or driving performance measures were collected and thereby it is questionable if there was a true positive effect on participants’ attention. However, the findings suggest that (in)attention warning systems might benefit from adaptation of the warnings to the upcoming driving demands. The findings can be utilized for the development of proactive and context-sensitive (in)attention monitoring and distraction mitigation systems.

Human factors research and engineering of advanced driving assistance systems (ADAS) must consider how drivers adapt to their presence. The major obstruction to this at the moment is poor understanding of the details of the adaptive processes that the human cognition undergoes when faced with such changes. This paper presents a simulation model that predicts how drivers adapt to a steering assistance system. Our approach is based on computational rationality, and demonstrates how task interleaving strategies adapt to the task environment and the driver’s goals and cognitive limitations. A supervisor controls eye movements between the driving and non-driving tasks, making this choice on the basis of maximising expected joint task utility. The model predicts that with steering assistance, drivers’ in car glance durations increase. We also show that this adaptation leads to risky driving in cases where the reliability of the system is compromised.

This article examines the cognitive process of visually experiencing user interfaces. It contributes to a theory- and methodology-grounded understanding of how UIs are experienced with regard to various aesthetic criteria. This aids in considering the targeted experience goals in relation to visual design choices—a problem that designers usually have to tackle intuitively. The issue in explicitly relating designs to experiences stems from the complexity of the process in which visual stimuli are processed and turned into experiences. The authors present a cognitive top-down approach to this process, rooted in the appraisal theory and the theory of the predictive brain. Several predictions are derived via this approach, and an eye-tracking experiment with Web sites is presented that provides evidence of them. The experience goals and repeated exposure to stimuli are shown to affect appraisal times and visual scanpaths in Web pages’ evaluation; this supports the top-down approach described. Researchers can use the findings to inform their theoretical and empirical pursuits as they strive to understand what makes design artefacts emotionally evocative, and the methodology outlined can assist designers in locating the visual regions and elements relevant for experiential design goals.

Three text entry methods were compared in a driving simulator study with 17 participants. Ninety-seven drivers' occlusion distance (OD) data mapped on the test routes was used as a baseline to evaluate the methods' visual distraction potential. Only the voice recognition-based text entry tasks passed the set verification criteria. Handwriting tasks were experienced as the most demanding and the voice recognition tasks as the least demanding. An individual in-car glance length preference was found, but against expectations, drivers' ODs did not correlate with in-car glance lengths or visual short-term memory capacity. The handwriting method was further studied with 24 participants with instructions and practice on writing eyes-on-road. The practice did not affect the test results. The findings suggest that handwriting could be visually less demanding than touch screen typing but the reliability of character recognition should be improved or the driver well-experienced with the method to minimize its distraction potential.

This is the first controlled quantitative analysis on the visual distraction effects of audio-visual route guidance in simulated, but ecologically realistic driving scenarios with dynamic maneuvers and self-controlled speed (N = 24). The audio-visual route guidance system under testing passed the set verification criteria, which was based on drivers' preferred occlusion distances on the test routes. There were no significant effects of an upcoming maneuver instruction location (up, down) on the in-car display on any metric or on the experienced workload. The drivers' median occlusion distances correlated significantly with median in-car glance distances. There was no correlation between drivers' median occlusion distance and intolerance of uncertainty but significant inverse correlations between occlusion distances and age as well as driving experience were found. The findings suggest that the visual distraction effects of audio-visual route guidance are low and provide general support for the proposed testing method.

We introduce T9+HUD, a text entry method designed to decrease visual distraction while driving and typing. T9+HUD combines a physical 3x4 keypad on the steering wheel with a head-up-display (HUD) for projecting output on the windshield. Previous work suggests this may be a visually less demanding way to type while driving than the popular case which requires shifts of visual attention away from the road. We present a prototype design and report first results from a controlled evaluation in a driving simulator. While driving, the T9+HUD text entry rate was equal compared to a dashboard-mounted touchscreen device, but it reduced lane deviations by 70%. Furthermore, there was no significant difference between T9+HUD and baseline driving in lane-keeping performance. T9+HUD decreased glance time off road by 64% in comparison to the touchscreen QWERTY. We conclude that the data are favorable and warrant more research on attention-reducing text input methods for driving.

We tested a commercial in-car navigation system prototype against the NHTSA criteria for acceptance testing of in-vehicle electronic devices, in order to see what types of in-car tasks fail the acceptance test and why. In addition, we studied the visual demands of the driving scenario recommended by NHTSA for task acceptance testing. In the light of the results, NHTSA guidelines and acceptance criteria need to be further developed. In particular visual demands of the driving scenario and for different simulators need to be standardized in order to enable fair testing and comparable test results. We suggest the visual occlusion method for finding a driving scenario that corresponds better with real-life driving in visual demands as well as for standardizing the visual demands of the scenario when applied to different driving simulators. Furthermore, the acceptance criteria need to be re-evaluated. Especially the TEORT limit's applicability to a variety of test tasks needs to be validated and exceptions for certain task types considered. The utility of the average glance duration criterion should be reconsidered.

Distraction effects of in-car tasks with a touch screen based navigation system user interface were studied in a driving simulator experiment with eye tracking. The focus was to examine which particular in-car task components visually distract drivers the most. The results indicate that all of the visual-manual in-car tasks led to increased levels of experienced demands and to lower driving speeds. The most significant finding was that text entry and kinetic scrolling of lists were the main sources of visual distraction whereas simple selection tasks with familiar target locations led to least severe distraction effects.

User interface features of a touch based mobile music player and their comparative impact on driver distraction when searching music albums were investigated. In a driving simulator experiment (N=18) three scrolling methods buttons, swipe and kinetic were compared, whereat the number of music tracks presented in a list-style format varied between three, five and seven items per page. Half of the participants used the music player in a portrait mode and half of them in a landscape mode. It was expected that swipe supports less severe distraction effects than kinetic or button due to systematic page-by-page scrolling and low levels of pointing accuracy required for browsing. Three items should enable more efficient visual sampling efficiency per page, but visual demands are increased compared to five or seven since more scrolling is required. Screen orientation should have no distraction effects. Results indicate that swipe led to less severe distraction effects than buttons or kinetic scrolling methods. Seven items per page was found most distracting, whereas few significant differences were found between three and five. As predicted, screen orientation had no significant effects.

The purpose of this paper is to clarify the differences between approaches in the research field of human-technology interaction. We are especially interested in individuating user psychology from the more traditional paradigms. Therefore, we suggest a preliminary theoretical framework of criteria for distinguishing and individuating the different interaction research paradigms. The framework consists of five dimensions in which the paradigms may vary from each other. In this paper, we also discuss how ubiquitous computing is related to some of the dimensions. In addition, we focus on defining the new elements user psychology can bring to the discussion and analysis of human-technology interaction. To demonstrate the usage of the framework, we apply it to differentiate user psychology from traditional HCI research.

In this paper, the effects of two user interface menu structures on a mobile device display, list and grid, are compared in a driving simulation with the measures of visual time-sharing efficiency, visual load, driving performance and secondary task performance. Eighteen participants conducted a set of eight Point-of-Interest (POI) search tasks with the grid- or list-style menus on navigation software during simulated driving. Between-subject analysis revealed that the list-style menu structure supports more efficient and systematic, and thus, safer interaction while driving than the grid-style menu, in terms of time-sharing and total glance time. However, significant effects of the menu structures were not found in secondary task performance, driving performance measured as lane excursions, or in the measures of average duration of, or total number of glances at the display. The results also suggest that the fewer items in a view, the more efficient and safer the interaction in terms of time-sharing. The sensitivity of the time-sharing metrics for revealing tactical level driver distraction in driving simulation can be argued as being at a higher level than the sensitivity of metrics related to lane maintenance, visual load or secondary task performance.