Design of Icons for Use by Chinese in Mainland China

The objective of this study was to investigate the impacts of cultural differences in cognitive abilities between the American and Chinese users on their performance with icon displays. The goal was to provide insight for software developers whose products might have potential Chinese users. The key factor in this study was the presentation mode of icon displays, which could be alphanumeric elements only, pictorial elements only, or a combined mode (both elements). An experiment was conducted with 30 American and 30 Chinese subjects. The subjects performed recognition tasks using different presentation modes. Results indicate that for the American subjects there were advantages to alphanumeric and combined modes, compared to the pictorial mode, in terms of performance time and errors. For Chinese subjects, there were advantages to pictorial and combined modes, compared with alphanumeric mode; their initial error rate also was lower using a combined mode than when using an alphanumeric one.

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