A foolish consistency? Aligning interface objects hinders location recall and may induce collinear errors
Peter Zelchenko, Li Xiangqian, Fu Xiaohan, Alex Ivanov, Zhenyu Gu

TL;DR
This study challenges the traditional use of rectilinear alignment in user interfaces, showing that such arrangements hinder location recall and may cause errors, based on four experiments with psychophysical and naturalistic methods.
Contribution
It provides empirical evidence that rectilinear alignment impairs location recall and introduces collinear errors, questioning longstanding UI design conventions.
Findings
Collinear arrays do not enhance recallability of object locations.
Noncollinear arrangements facilitate automatic location recall.
Collinear arrangements may induce errors in recalling neighboring object locations.
Abstract
During our nearly constant use of digital devices, perhaps our most frequent need is to visually identify icons representing our content and invoke the actions to manipulate them. Almost since the inception of user interface design in the 1970s, with rare exception it has become the tendency for programmers to prescribe the arrangement these things in uniform rectilinear rows and columns. This was imported from theories for print design and ultimately brought into widespread practice for graphical user interfaces (GUIs). Whether consistent rectilinearity actually does better than less rectilinear arrangements to maximize selection efficiency has not been challenged on considerations of speed or any other measure. In a series of four experiments, we explore how alignment may in fact discourage easy recallability of screen object locations and hence increase search intensity. A second…
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Taxonomy
TopicsData Visualization and Analytics · Color perception and design · Tactile and Sensory Interactions
