Sarah A. Douglas
Arthur E. Kirkpatrick
Abstract
User interfaces for color selection consist of a visible screen representation, an input method, and the underlying conceptual organization of the color model. We report a two-way factorial, between-subjects variable experiment that tested the effect of high and low visual feedback interfaces on speed and accuracy of color matching for RGB and HSV color models. The only significant effect was improved accuracy due to increased visual feedback. Using color groups as a within-subjects variable, we found differences in performance of both speed and accuracy. We recommend that experimental tests adopt a color test set that does not show bias toward a particular model, but is based instead on a range of colors that would be most likely matched in practice by people using color selection software. We recomment the Macbeth Color Checker naturals, primaries, and grays. As a follow-up study, a qualitative case analysis of the way users navigated through the color space indicates that feedback helps users with limited knowledge of the model, allowing them to refine their match to a higher degree of accuracy. Users with very little or a lot of knowledge of the color model do not appear to be aided by increased feedback. In conclusion, we suggest that visual feedback and design of the interface may be a more important factor in improving the usability of a color selection interface than the particular color model used.
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Index Terms
- Model and representation: the effect of visual feedback on human performance in a color picker interface
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Reviews
Raphael M. Malyankar
Douglas and Kirkpatrick describe studies on human performance in color matching, using the results to hypothesize about relationships between users' mental models and the visual representations modeled. The authors attempt, first, to distinguish the effects on user performance of using different color models (in the studies reported, red, green, blue, or RGB, and hue, saturation, value, or HSV) from the effects of provision of different levels of feedback by the color selection interface. The results report no significant performance differences between the RGB and HSV color models. Feedback level was discovered to affect accuracy but not time taken to match. A second study is also reported, consisting of qualitative analysis of user actions during the matching process, which captures subjects' navigation in the color space and thus their strategies for search in the color space. The analyses suggest that hill-climbing strategies are used for this problem (at least, with the interface used in the experiment). The implications for color picking and suitability of color models for human problem solving on this kind of problem are discussed, as are possible effects of biasing of results due to the nature of the target colors and interface capability, and implications for current widely used color selection interfaces. The authors believe that visual feedback and interface design are more important than the color model used. Their discoveries about the non-significance of color models on color picking (or at least, of the HSV and RGB models) are interesting and, though not entirely unintuitive, may be useful for interface designers who need to add color-picking-like facilities. Follow-up experiments on the relationships between human search behavior, feedback types and levels, and the structure of search spaces should be interesting.
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