Research on the influences of information presentation on information capture and performance in digital control systems

ABSTRACT

This study investigates the effects of information presentation on operator performance in digital control systems at different levels of task difficulty in order to resolve the conflict between ‘large amounts of information’ and ‘limited display’. By using software to present figures of varying difficulty as target information, the operator’s behaviour such as page switching and target clicking is simulated to obtain data. Simultaneously, eye-tracking technique was used to analyse how the way information was presented at different levels of difficulty influenced the subjects’ search performance. The results show that subjects’ performance gradually decreases as the difficulty of the numbers grows for both presentations, and it is found that the complexity of the content of the navigation bar may have influenced the subjects to some extent. In addition, the different position of the navigation bar where the target is located will result in a change in the search pattern. It is noticeable that dividing the single page into double pages can effectively alleviate the contradiction of ‘large amount of information’ and ‘limited display’ in designing the system interface. Therefore, this study provides certain guideline value for the interface design of digital control systems.

KEYWORDS:

• Digital control system
• task difficulty
• operation performance
• page switching
• eye-movement data

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by National Natural Science Foundation of China [grant number 71673220].