Finding what changes: a technique for evaluating icon coding in display systems

In large-scale systems a user may be required to perform status-monitoring tasks that rely upon the detection of changes among differentially coded icons. We demonstrate a technique for analyzing the utility of coding dimensions in terms of the users' ability to detect display changes in icons that share properties (form, color, orientation, etc.). Results suggest that observers may use the dimensions of color and form to selectively attend to the icons relevant to the task. However, users were unable to completely filter out irrelevant icons to the detriment of their performance on the change detection task.