Effects of emotional design and age on learning performance of self-care instructions for diabetes: Evidence from eye-tracking and heart rate variability

Abstract

Objective

The study aimed to examine the effects of emotional design and age on individuals’ learning performance of diabetes self-care instruction.

Materials and Methods

A two-factor (3 × 2) between-subjects design was employed, with emotional design and age as independent variables. Participants (30 young adults and 30 middle-aged and older adults) were required to learn with a series of text-illustration combined instructions in various design formats (i.e., neutral, black-and-white anthropomorphic, and colored anthropomorphic designs). Participants’ learning time, comprehension test score, eye-movement measures, heart rate variability (HRV) measures, and subjective perceptions were measured and analyzed.

Results

The three design formats achieved comparable task performance; however, the black-and-white anthropomorphic design resulted in a longer first visit duration. Middle-aged and older adults took longer time to learn the instructions and yielded lower comprehension test score. They also yielded longer total fixation duration, smaller pupil size, larger first visit duration, fewer visits, lower SD2/SD1, and higher perceived cognitive load than younger adults. Eye movement behaviors were also found to differ between the illustration and text portions.

Conclusions

Emotional design in instruction design did not facilitate nor hamper learning. Further studies need to determine the optimal level of emotional design. Middle-aged and older adults may experience difficulties when learning self-care instructions. Moreover, it is feasible to implement eye-tracking and HRV techniques when evaluating interface design. Human factors experiment need to be conducted to examine how emotional design manipulations affect individuals’ comprehension to ensure the learning materials can be truly effective when applied in practice.