(The) effects of contexts on information design

Abstract

The aim of this study is to build structured knowledge on the use of contexts in information design by investigating their effects on the attributes of high-quality information.

Context affects all of people’s activities and experiences of activities. It is a crucial factor in understanding human cognitive behavior as well as an inherent property of human cognition to access information differentially in different contexts. An information need cannot be divorced from its context because the context not only reflects the figures of the real world in which the information is represented but also makes the information available to the real world in which human-information interaction occurs. Although the issues of context and its importance have been addressed repeatedly by many scholars in recent years, the possibility of acceptable information design that considers context has rarely been questioned. Information design should strive to be a broad-spectrum solution that supports representation of both the information contents associated with an event and the operational information contexts and that is able to assist the information contents to be clear. It is therefore necessary for information designers to understand how those contexts should be applied to the information design domain in terms of design by context.

To design high-quality information using contexts in information design, this study first provided the ten attributes of high-quality information―understandability, accessibility, appropriateness, objectivity, attractiveness, relevancy, completeness, conciseness, lack of errors, and valuableness―and second addressed the foundational discussions on the attributes of high-quality information and contexts, which are concerned with three major categories: information end users, information artifacts, and information environmental problems. Based on the relationship between the two issues above, this study suggested the context framework assumption available for the information design domain

(1) the framework is composed of a two-dimensional coordinate system, with layered structure range on the X-axis and functional depth on the Y-axis

(2) the layered structure range covers internal context, external context, and extreme external context

(3) the functional depth likewise is composed of “context as ignition” and “context as setting”

(4) contexts as ignition cover the intrinsic motivation (IM), structure of information sets (SI), and cultural semiosis (CS)

the most significantly positive influence was on “attractiveness.” The SI context property had a strongly positive influence on most of the ten high-quality information attributes, except for “accessibility”

the most significantly positive influence was on “conciseness.” The CS context property had a strongly positive influence on all ten of the high-quality information attributes

the most significantly positive influence was on “relevancy.” The IS context property had a strongly positive influence on all ten of the high-quality information attributes

the most significantly positive influence was on “appropriateness.” The AC context property had a strongly positive influence on all ten of the high-quality information attributes

the most significantly positive influence was on “appropriateness.” The SS context property had a strongly positive influence on five types of high-quality information attributes: understandability, accessibility, appropriateness, attractiveness, and relevancy. The most significantly positive influence was on “relevancy.” Among the six types of context properties, the IS context property had the highest impact on the attributes of high-quality information than the others. The priority of the influence of each type of context property from high-quality information attributes was as follows

what types of context properties were important for information design domain, how these context properties made information design outputs highly qualitative, and how information users’ characteristics were related to the context properties. Based on the specific implementation process of the case studies and the results mentioned above, this study concludes that the effects of contexts on information design consist of the following five issues: (1) context shapes information contents, and contexts and contents cannot be separated

(2) contexts influence the attributes of information quality, which are crucial issues in the information design domain

(3) contexts are important resources for structuring information in human-constructed artifacts

(4) contexts make us understand information users’ individual experiences and preferences

and (5) contexts as setting cover the individual-level schemas (IS), atmospheric cues (AC), and social-default schemas (SS).

To verify the correlation between the context properties and the attributes of high-quality information, case studies were performed with experimental stimuli. A total of thirty stimulus candidates were designed and, among them, eighteen cases of information design were finally chosen through a screening process. Each of the eighteen cases of information design reflected one of the six types of context properties (IM, SI, CS, IS, AC, or SS). The results of 204 usable questionnaires, which were from Korean, Chinese, American, Australian, and German participants, were used for the statistical analysis. Through the survey and its statistical analyses, this study verified that there were significant relationships between the context properties and most of the high-quality information attributes. Also, the context properties have predictive power regarding high-quality information attributes. Specifically, the IM context property had a strongly positive influence on all ten of the high-quality information attributes

(1) IS context property, (2) AC context property, (3) CS context property, (4) IM context property, (5) SS context property, and (6) SI context property. In an overall perspective, the “context as setting” had a stronger impact respectively on the ten high-quality information attributes than the “context as ignition.” In addition, among the ten attributes of high-quality information, appropriateness, relevancy, understandability, and objectivity were relatively more influenced by the context properties.

Furthermore, this study provided a discussion about the correlations between the context properties and the participants’ characteristics (gender, age, education level, major fields of study, ethnic origin, nationality, cognitive style, thinking style, and degree of understanding texts on the suggested stimulus). As a result, the cognitive style and the nationality had the significant influence on the context properties. Participants who exhibit field dependent cognitive style tend to rely on information provided by the contexts. The degree of influence by context was different between Koreans and Americans (Koreans were a lot more impacted by the context properties compared to Americans). The other participants’ characteristics did not have any effect on comprehending the context properties or the levels of relationship were not significantly different within this study.

Within the overall comprehension, this study showed the clear evidences about three major issues

and (5) contexts are the tools to support methodologies for analyzing communication problems and developing the components of the planned communication effort solution, and the context framework assumption can be used for the effective design principle. This is the evidence that the success of information design outputs is very context-dependent. We can conclude therefore that without concerning the issue of contexts, good information design cannot be guaranteed, and contexts and their properties are a new range of information design challenges.

This study provided a new possibility to apply contexts for information design activities in terms of design by context. The limitations of this study include that the sample cases were limited within the scope that mainly considers informational graphics, instructional graphics, and how-to guides. Across a broad range of media in a complex world, more diverse cases of information design need to be considered in further research.

There are two major conclusions of this study. One is that information designers can utilize contexts as a new resource along with contents for designing good information output. The second is that from now on, information designers can handle contexts in a tangible manner no matter whether they are about information users, information artifacts, or environmental problems.