A STUDY ON THE RELATION OF DYNAMIC ICONS BETWEEN ACTION COMBINATION & AESTHETIC

Abstract

In the digital era, understanding visual psychological effects of dynamic icons in viewers in order to meet the requirements of digital design communication is a very important issue. The purpose of this research: (1) To investigate aesthetics of visual design and its data analysis methods. (2) To examine the influence of aesthetic factors of dynamic icon on viewer's pleasantness. (3) To identify the best action feature combinations that meet the optimization of respondents' psychological characteristics and to propose recommendations towards dynamic icon design. In order to examine the influences of action features of dynamic icon on its aesthetics, three research methods, i.e., semantic differential method and conjoint analysis were utilized to investigate on aesthetics of dynamic icon. Study results have initially verified that aesthetics evoking level could be predicted by aesthetic factors. This research adopted semantic differential method and factor analysis method for data analysis. An "emotional vocabulary list" (a total of 20 sets of adjectives) was constructed and scaled down by factor analysis. A total of seven sets of key factors of aesthetics were generalized, including beauty, recognition, arousal, balance, variation, symbol and timeliness. The experiment employed conjoint analysis for data analysis to examine the influences of action combinations of dynamic icon on aesthetics. Analysis results concluded that representation of single-action, combinations of two action features as well as three action features contributed to different influences on viewer's aesthetics.