The Effect of Visualisation on a Cognitively Demanding Task

Sammanfattning: Nowadays, it is more common to see simple interfaces rather than working with the interfaces which look complex. The problem that most students and experts face with when evaluating an interface is mixing up the meaning of usability and complexity. The point is that some of these complex interfaces fulfill the requirements for the definition of usability, ISO 9241 (Bevan, 2001) and usefulness (Nielsen, 2012). In the experiments in what follows, visualization might help the subjects to have a better understanding of a riddle. We did two experiments in two different times and in both of them a well-known riddle was given to the subjects. Since the subjects had to repeat the riddle by themselves to solve it, they had to use their working memory. The riddle was presented in two conditions (auditory and visual) in the first experiment and in three conditions (auditory, visual, visual informative) in the second experiment. In both the first and second experiment the subjects of visual condition did not perform much better than the auditory condition. In the second experiment the subjects did much better in the visual informative condition in comparison with the auditory and visual condition. My conclusion is that the vague visualization does not help much and sometimes bad visualization may misguide the user. But having good visualization with necessary information can help the subjects to have better performance.