Signal Words and Signal Icons in Application Control and Information Technology Exception Messages—Hazard Matching and Habituation Effects

Abstract

Information technology (IT) users encounter signal words (e.g., “Warning”) and signal icons (e.g., an exclamation point) in “exception messages.” The first of two experiments reported in this paper examines the “arousal strength” associated with signal words and icons that commonly appear in exception messages. An elicitation exercise was completed by 316 participants, in which each viewed exception messages containing combinations of signal words and icons and provided their perception as to the severity of a computer problem communicated. The results allow “hazard matching”; whereby, the severity of hazard implied by the exception message can be matched to the level of the hazard. The second experiment reports a strong habituation effect in that users exhibit decreased attention to an exception message after repeated exposure, with a corresponding decrease in compliance. The effect was also found to be mitigated by increasing the arousal strength of the exception message.

The effect of developer-specified explanations for permission requests on smartphone user behavior

“…A technical error also caused some participants to be shown incorrect images in the Purpose and Control tasks, resulting in 568 participants in these conditions. 2 …”

“…While runtime requests provide context to the user, a decade of usability research has shown that users may become habituated to these warnings, making them ineffective [2,6,8,23,25]. Because habituation increases with each warning exposure [15], researchers have studied ways to minimize unnecessary warnings [24] and to make important warnings more salient [5].…”

Symbolism in Computer Security Warnings: Signal Icons & Signal Words

“…They could choose the most preferred number where 1 indicate strongly disagree and 7 indicates strongly agree. Studies by [15,17] also conducted the similar survey method to access the end users insights of the current implementation of security warnings however different in scenario used. The Likert-scale is chosen because it is easy to construct, have a high probability of producing a dependable scale and it is easy to be comprehend by the participants [18].…”

“…Studies by [15] revealed how the users of IT perceive the severity of hazard and detailed assessment of the signal icons and signal words. They claimed that by combining signal words and signal icon in a security warnings, the level of hazard perceive by the end users are higher as shown in Table I.…”

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“…However, overly frequent active warnings (e.g. from false positives) lead to habituation effects [1]. Thus, there are many situations in which passive indicators seem to be more promising and should therefore be further investigated.…”