Ticketless travel has now become the main way of flying. Without a physical ticket, passengers have to remember their flight information in order to check their flight status at the airport. Thus, the design of the flight information display has become a key factor that affects search efficiency when passengers check the status of their flight. The objective of this study is to determine the effects of airline logo and information layout on visual search patterns and thereby explain their implications on visual search time, so that a design with a shorter search time can be determined....[ Read more ]

Ticketless travel has now become the main way of flying. Without a physical ticket, passengers have to remember their flight information in order to check their flight status at the airport. Thus, the design of the flight information display has become a key factor that affects search efficiency when passengers check the status of their flight. The objective of this study is to determine the effects of airline logo and information layout on visual search patterns and thereby explain their implications on visual search time, so that a design with a shorter search time can be determined.

Twenty-four layouts with and without the presence of airline logos are studied. First, the results show that the search time is significantly shorter in layouts which have the flight number in the leftmost column compared to the other layouts (p<0.05); the airline logo is also significant on the search time (p<0.05).

Secondly, fixation distribution and conditional transition, which describes the probability of transition from one column to other columns, are used to describe the visual search patterns. The experimental data show that layout has a significant effect on fixation distribution, and conditional transitions starting from the first three columns. Logos are also significant (p<0.05). In terms of search patterns, the subjects start to search from the leftmost column, and move to the right columns. Hence, fixation is primarily placed on the first three columns, and then transitions to ‘flight number’ more than the other information columns.