The Influence of Usability on User Cognitive Activity: A Differential Intelligence Perspective

Modern quantitative usability research clearly shows a lack of attention to the pragmatic aspects of user experience related to the cognitive processes that accompany most online tasks. Non-taking these processes into account critically prevents formation of informed understanding of the complex, multidimensional structure of user experience, in which intelligence and emotion interact. We use a systems-integrative approach to the structure of intelligence to investigate the relationship between cognitive activity of Internet users and the factors that may shape it during completion of typical tasks, while performing some typical tasks, such as searching and selecting information on a website or classifying online content. In particular, we use the concept of differentiated intelligence, which differentiates cognitive modes into perceptual and semantic intelligence; we set their manifestations via the respective types of tasks (‘perceptual’ = search for signs, and ‘semantic’ = search for meanings). Moreover, we expect that both cognitive modes may be critically affected by the conditions of the experiment, as previous research suggests. The four large-scale factors that may cast impact upon the results are united in the ‘contextual fidelity’ model of usability testing. Our research design allows for detecting: 1) if product features (‘good/bad’ design with/without modularity and contrast) enable much better performance in both perceptual and semantic modes; 2) if testing conditions (group/individual) and task complexity (easy/complex) critically affect the impact of design upon the two modes of cognition during task performance. The results by 80 assessors allow for stating the synergetic effect of modularity + contrast for perceptual tasks but not for complex semantic ones. Additionally, harmonious design works very differently for various types of tasks, not compensating for task complexity in semantics-oriented tasks but providing rapid growth of efficiency for perceptual ones, as well as for easier tasks of any type.