Development and validation of icons varying in their abstractness

Icons are used widely in human-computer interfaces. The level of abstractness-concreteness of an icon and its effect upon performance is of widespread interest. The authors have devised a quantitative measure for abstractness based on the complexity of the icon. They test their metric against subjective judgments of abstractness as identified by two different groups of subjects. After ranking two sets of ‘abstract’ and ‘concrete’ icons, the authors examined how well the icons were matched to the Pascal constructs that they represented. Further experiments were conducted using different groups of subjects to check whether correct matching of the icons with constructs was influenced by context. In summary the authors found that their metric was a good match for subjective measures of abstractness-concreteness. They also found that there is a better identification of concrete icons than abstract icons. Finally, it was shown that context does affect the correct identification of icons.