Web contents design and evaluation by considering image-language processing characteristics of hard-of-hearing persons

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In 2006, we conducted an experiment to compare alternative representations of directories for improving usability of web sites. The experiment simulated a directory-based information search task to understand how it is performed when directories are represented in text, labeled pictograms, or unlabeled pictograms. Twenty-one hard-of-hearing, who were skilled at processing pictograms, and 21 hearing participants, skilled at processing text; were asked to select one of 27 directories represented in one of the three alternative formats for each of 38 queries ranging from easy to difficult. The result demonstrated that it took more time to select a directory for the difficult queries than for the easy queries and that it took the least time when the directories were represented in labeled pictograms. In addition, the degree of variability in directories selected by each of the participant groups was greater for the difficult queries than for the easy queries and decreased monotonically for the hearing group as the format became more textual. However, it stayed approximately at the same level for the hard-of-hearing group.In 2007, we carried out further analysis on eye movement data that were collected in the above-mentioned experiment. We found that only in the labeled-pictogram condition, the hearing group and the hard-of-hearing group performed equally well in terms of the number of fixations and the fixation times. We conclude that labeled-pictogram representation has advantage over text representation. This implies that the participants gathered information necessary to select a directory most efficiently when the directories were represented by text and pictograms. We suggest that web site designers should use labeled-pictogram to achieve fest and easy navigability of directory-based web sites.