EXPERIMENTS IN DISPLAY EVALUATION.
Abstract
Four experiments were performed with the following objectives: (1) further explore a proposed method of display evaluation; (2) relate the proposed method to conventional measures of display 'goodness'; (3) examine the effects of three types of informational irrelevancy on decision adequacy; and (4) test a hypothesis relating to the effects of compressing discrete informational units onto single symbols. In all experiments except those related to objective 2, the subject's task was to make a military-type decision based on information presented on the display. Two decision-game formats were used; the first was logistical while the second used an air-reconnaissance situation. In these studies, each decision the subject made was associated with an explicit cost-payoff function. Since each problem required a series of such decisions, a weighted sum of the payoffs, minus the costs, was the method of display evaluation. Each of several display variables (such as density, use of color, or clutter), and response variables (such as search time) was related to cost-payoff scores, depending on the experiment. Major conclusions were that the decision-quality metric is potentially useful for evaluating display systems, and that information-extraction measures apparently are unrelated to the metric. It was also revealed that the effectiveness of a display is positively related to the amount and randomness of irrelevant information presented in the display. (Author)
Document Details
- Document Type
- Technical Report
- Publication Date
- Jul 01, 1967
- Accession Number
- AD0658733
Entities
People
- Carl A. Silver
- Daniel Landis
- James M. Jones
- Robert M. Slivka