The Impacts of Wayfinding Affordance on User Experience in Virtual Worlds

With rapidly changing advances in technology, VEs have gained much attention from both scholarly and practitioner communities. In spite of intense and widespread efforts, most VE-related research has focused on the technical aspects of applications. By contrast, the necessary theoretical framework needed to assess the quality of interfaces and designs has not yet been fully developed. This research, as a response to such challenges, investigates usability issues of VE interface and design. For this purpose, four different experimental conditions were set up and tested. The study results show that the design of wayfinding affordance has significant effects on users’ perceptual experience as well as their task performance. Task performance was significantly better where affordance cues were provided independently from the VE interfaces. In addition, the study indicates that the fixed and, therefore, stable interfaces provides a better sense of presence whereas manipulative and customizable interfaces offers a greater level of playfulness. The research findings also point out that the design of 3D interfaces has a greater impact on non-expert users than on expert users.