Subjective Perception of the Background Color and Layout in the Design of Typical Graphical Control Panels

The main goal of this research is to examine the influence of various control panel background colors and geometrical layouts on users’ subjective perceptions. We investigated five different colors including red, green, blue, white and grey as well as two different arrangements of the panel’s informative and controlling items. In the latter case, more vertical and more horizontal layouts were investigated. Panels included typical elements and colors were selected in such a way that their perceptual differences in the CIE Lab color space are similar. A method involving pairwise comparisons was applied to compute relative preferences towards examined conditions. The outcomes generally showed significant influence of the studied effects on the subjects’ subjective assessments.

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