Most preferred user interface elements by participants

When the participants used the Adaptable-maps website they needed to select the user interface elements that they liked the most. After summarising all preferences the following combinations of user interface elements were selected by the majority of users: white background, Arial font, font in black colour, medium size font, normal font spacing and buttons colour-filled. It will be referred to as the most preferred user interface combination.

This combination of user interface elements was selected to be modelled in the webDesigASD ontology as the autism profile web interface. This means that when a user did not have any preferences and went by the default profile, the system already had the user interface combination that was most preferred by the participants in the current study, so the user interface was presented according to this combination of colour and sizes.

5.5

Discussion and conclusions

The implementation of a website related to transport-planning called Adaptable-maps helped to compare current web mapping websites (Google maps, Bing Maps and Waze) and to explore if they are accessible for people on the autism spectrum. The most well-known transportation-planning website was Google maps, and it was also the one preferred by the majority of participants. As a result, the current study was able to explore how a totally new website might compare with a very familiar website such as Google maps, and how they compare with other websites in the market that are not as well known by participants.

The eye-tracking data demonstrated that even though Google maps was the most popular website for web transport planning, it was not the most efficient website when participants were looking for driving directions measured in time to complete the task. The data exposed that users had to perform more and longer saccades when using Google maps compared with the Adaptable-maps website when they were required to find information. Despite this, participants scored Google maps higher. It is known that change can be hard to process for people on the autism spectrum (Daniels & Mandell, 2014). It is possible that the familiarity factor added more to their preferences than the efficiency factor. As they were more familiar with the Google maps website it is possible that they preferred to use a website that was less accessible but better known to them.

The eye-tracking data generated focus maps, heat maps and scanpath images that demonstrate that the autistic users in the current study got easily distracted by irrelevant elements in websites. For example, Google maps had icons in parks and titles in

commercial/retail places and users were fixating in those areas when they were looking for driving instructions. These icons and labels are not relevant to perform the search but as they have small icons and label on the map, users tend to fixate on them. Another example is that Bing Maps had a menu to change the style of the map in the left top section of the website, and it was greatly fixated on by the participants while not having any relevance to the search for driving instructions. In Waze, the little comic icons around the map distracted all participants; fixations and saccades on this website were the highest of all four websites evaluated. As the mode of transport is not explicit in Waze, all participants hesitated and were looking for an icon or title explaining which was the mode of transport in which the directions were presented. In the Adaptable-maps website the icon for changing the map to full screen caught the attention of several participants causing fixations when it was an irrelevant option in the map for the given task.

Many users approved the use of two different boxes for search directions, one box for the start point and another box for the destination point. The Adaptable-maps website was the only one with that option.

One user did not know how to use any transport website. This was a very critical finding that should be addressed in future research. Four other participants did not know how to use some or other of the websites.

Some users believed they had completed the task when it was not the case, as the location they found was incorrect. For example, in the case of Perth Station, there is another place called Perth Rail Station that it is located on the North-side of the city. Some participants used the Perth Rail Station to answer the questions of the experiment without realising that they had selected the wrong place and the driving directions were not correct.

Longer scanpath lengths on a webpage are related to less efficient searching as more elements are tracked visually as part of completing a task. The scanpaths showing users’ visual attention in Google maps, Bing Maps and Waze presented long and multiple paths, demonstrating that users were constantly changing focus and fixating on elements that were at a distance from each other. The scanpath in the Adaptable-maps website presented shorter and closer paths demonstrating that the most relevant elements for users were closer to each other, an advantage for more efficient searching.

In conclusion, the implementation and evaluation of the Adaptable-maps website demonstrated that following the web design accessibility guidelines presented in Chapter 3 and the ontology-based design presented in Chapter 4, resulted in the creation of an accessible website that allowed autistic users to make more efficient searches by requiring shorter scanpaths and total time-duration when compared with current transport-planning websites (Google maps, Bing Maps and Waze).

The following chapter, Chapter 6, lists the contributions and future work found by this research.