Empirical Investigation on Cognitive User Interface Dimensions

In line to the introduction of the online museum, a user interface is a new medium to allow museum collections to be exhibited and promoted more effectively. For promoting purposes, this paper stresses on usability of the interface design. It is critical to pay attention to the cognitive design and ensure that the interface is usable in order to help users understand the displayed information. The user interface design for online museum has commanded significant attention from designers and researchers but lacks in the cognitive design perspective. In the effort to formalize the design, this paper is the extension of the initial work on a user interface design dimensions. The individual differences approach is adopted to explore possible user interface design elements. This study also validates the dimensions by conducting empirical investigation. The investigation is to test the hypotheses linkage between cognitive styles and user interface dimensions. The research method involves using Field Dependent and Field Independent as the case study and webbased survey on online museum visitors. The result of the analysis suggests cognitive styles do influence user interface dimensions. These design dimensions contain the implications for cognitive design of user interface development, and the identification of cognitive design of user interface for cultural website. The effort may contribute towards increasing the usability level of the website.