Towards user–intuitive web interface sign design and evaluation: A semiotic framework

• Find the underlying features of users’ interpretations of web interface signs.
• Discover the semiotic features to design and evaluation of web interface signs.
• Propose a semiotic framework for user–intuitive interface sign design and evaluation.
• A set of semiotic heuristics for user–intuitive interface sign design is proposed.

Although signs like navigation links, small images, buttons and thumbnails are important elements of web user interfaces, they are often poorly understood. Based on data gathered over a 3-year period (2011–2013) making use of observations in a usability testing lab, by expert review and by structured and semi-structured interviewing users, we developed a Semiotic Interface sign Design and Evaluation (SIDE) framework, consisting of five semiotic layers: syntactic, pragmatic, social, environment and semantic. The framework includes an extended set of determinants and heuristics, based on four empirical studies that help practitioners design and evaluate intuitive interface signs that can be accurately interpreted by users with less effort.