Skeuomorphic or flat? The effects of icon style on visual search and recognition performance

Although there have been many previous studies on icon visual search and recognition performance, only a few have considered the effects of both the internal and external characteristics of icons. In this behavioral study, we employed a visual search task and a semantic recognition task to explore the effects of icon style, semantic distance (SD), and task difficulty on users’ performance in perceiving and identifying icons. First, we created and filtered 64 new icons, which were divided into four different groups (flat design & close SD, flat design & far SD, skeuomorphic design & close SD, skeuomorphic design & far SD) through expert evaluation. A total of 40 participants (13 men and 27 women, ages ranging from 19 to 25 years, mean age = 21.9 years, SD=1.93) were asked to perform an icon visual search task and an icon recognition task after a round of learning. Participants’ accuracy and response time were measured as a function of the following independent variables: two icon styles (flat or skeuomorphic style), two levels of SD (close or far), and two levels of task difficulty (easy or difficult). The results showed that flat icons had better visual search performance than skeuomorphic icons; this beneficial effect increased as the task difficulty increased. However, in the icon recognition task, participants’ performance in recalling skeuomorphic icons was significantly better than that in recalling flat icons. Furthermore, a strong interaction effect between icon style and task difficulty was observed for response time. As the task difficulty decreased, the difference in recognition performance between these two different icon styles increased significantly. These findings provide valuable guidance for the design of icons in human–computer interaction interfaces.