Cumulative Impact of Testing Factors in Usability Tests for Human-Centered Web Design

The study examines the cumulative impact of factors that affect usability testing for user-centered web design, namely the so-called ‘contextual fidelity model’ factors that include product properties, task features, user traits, and environment/context factors. Today, the design, user experience and usability (DUXU) research experiences a lack of studies that would assess combinatorial, rather than individual, effects of these factors upon user performance. We address this gap by seeing both independent factors and the resulting user states as complex and dynamic, and testing the combined impact of aesthetic quality of websites, user traits, and individual/group experiment settings upon formation of two dysfunctional user states that critically affect user performance, namely monotony and anxiety. We develop a research design that allows for assessing the combinatorial effects in formation of user dysfunctionality. For that, we conduct a study with 80 assessors of Russian/European and Chinese origin in individual/group setting, employing two types of tasks and websites of high/low aesthetic quality. As the results of our experiment show, group task solving enhances the synchronous impact of website aesthetics and task features upon user states. Interaction of high-quality design, group environment, and monotonous tasks provides for an antagonistic effect when aesthetic layout in a group environment significantly reduces the fatigue rate. Low aesthetic quality in a group environment leads to cumulative enhancing of dysfunctionality for both monotony and anxiety. We conclude by setting questions and prospects for further research