Exploring Interface Sign Ontologies for Web User Interface Design and Evaluation: A User Study

Part 2: Organizational Semiotics and ApplicationsInternational audienceThe aim of this paper is twofold: firstly, to find the set of ontologies (i.e., the set of concepts and skills) presupposed by users when interpreting the meaning of web interface signs (i.e., the smallest elements of web user interfaces), and secondly, to investigate users’ difficulties in interpreting the meanings of interface signs belonging to different kinds of ontologies. In order to achieve these aims an empirical user study was conducted with 26 test participants. The study data was gathered by semi-structured interviews and questionnaires. Following an empirical research approach, descriptive statistics and qualitative data analysis were used to analyze the data. The study results provide a total of twelve ontologies and reveal the users’ difficulties in interpreting the meanings of interface signs belonging to different kinds of ontologies

Multimedia analysis and design: a conceptual framework

The paper proposes a conceptual model inspired to semiotic theories, to be applied to the analysis and design of multimedia. We introduce a meta-model with four levels of semantic aggregation. There results a framework of concepts, relations and processes accounting for the multiple meanings that arise from a multimedia text. We explore the effectiveness of the model by considering four commercial clips by the brand Lanc\uf4me. Our analysis confirms that the framework is well suited to the analysis, indexing, design of narrative multimedia

Brand and usability in content-intensive websites

Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI)Our connections to the digital world are invoked by brands, but the intersection of branding and interaction design is still an under-investigated area. Particularly, current websites are designed not only to support essential user tasks, but also to communicate an institution's intended brand values and traits. What we do not yet know, however, is which design factors affect which aspect of a brand. To demystify this issue, three sub-projects were conducted. The first project developed a systematic approach for evaluating the branding effectiveness of content-intensive websites (BREW). BREW gauges users' brand perceptions on four well-known branding constructs: brand as product, brand as organization, user image, and brand as person. It also provides rich guidelines for eBranding researchers in regard to planning and executing a user study and making improvement recommendations based on the study results. The second project offered a standardized perceived usability questionnaire entitled DEEP (design-oriented evaluation of perceived web usability). DEEP captures the perceived website usability on five design-oriented dimensions: content, information architecture, navigation, layout consistency, and visual guidance. While existing questionnaires assess more holistic concepts, such as ease-of-use and learnability, DEEP can more transparently reveal where the problem actually lies. Moreover, DEEP suggests that the two most critical and reliable usability dimensions are interface consistency and visual guidance. Capitalizing on the BREW approach and the findings from DEEP, a controlled experiment (N=261) was conducted by manipulating interface consistency and visual guidance of an anonymized university website to see how these variables may affect the university's image. Unexpectedly, consistency did not significantly predict brand image, while the effect of visual guidance on brand perception showed a remarkable gender difference. When visual guidance was significantly worsened, females became much less satisfied with the university in terms of brand as product (e.g., teaching and research quality) and user image (e.g., students' characteristics). In contrast, males' perceptions of the university's brand image stayed the same in most circumstances. The reason for this gender difference was revealed through a further path analysis and a follow-up interview, which inspired new research directions to unpack even more the nexus between branding and interaction design