Ergonomic Evaluation of Small-screen Leading Displays on the Visual Performance of Chinese Users

Leading display represents a mechanism for exhibiting temporal information instead of spatial information to overcome the limitations of small-screen mobile devices. Previous studies examining this area focused only on information presented by leading displays, the use of such devices may be influenced by the context of tasks and adaptability of users was somehow disregarded. Actually, mobile interaction is often a secondary task performed while doing something else; the attention of leading-display users cannot always be assumed to be only on reading leading-display information. Therefore, this investigation performed a dual-task experiment (a search task for static information and a reading task for leading display information) to examine the effects of leading-display factors on the visual performance of users during different stages of usage (whether current usage is the first, second, third, fourth, or fifth day of usage) for a small screen. The results showed that leading display design factors did not distract participants from static information search tasks but did affect participant reading comprehension on leading displays. Speed and presentation mode significantly influenced the participants' reading comprehension. Consequently, the possible applications of leading displays and the implications of these findings on reading Chinese text are discussed.