What Color Scheme is More Effective in Assisting Readers to Locate Information in a Color-Coded Article?
This addresses the understudied impact of color schemes on information seeking for readers using color-coded documents, with incremental improvements in design choices.
The study tackled the problem of how color choice affects information seeking in LLM-coded text documents, finding that non-analogous and yellow-inclusive color schemes improved performance in timed tasks, with yellow-inclusive schemes also being more preferred by participants.
Color coding, a technique assigning specific colors to cluster information types, has proven advantages in aiding human cognitive activities, especially reading and comprehension. The rise of Large Language Models (LLMs) has streamlined document coding, enabling simple automatic text labeling with various schemes. This has the potential to make color-coding more accessible and benefit more users. However, the impact of color choice on information seeking is understudied. We conducted a user study assessing various color schemes' effectiveness in LLM-coded text documents, standardizing contrast ratios to approximately 5.55:1 across schemes. Participants performed timed information-seeking tasks in color-coded scholarly abstracts. Results showed non-analogous and yellow-inclusive color schemes improved performance, with the latter also being more preferred by participants. These findings can inform better color scheme choices for text annotation. As LLMs advance document coding, we advocate for more research focusing on the "color" aspect of color-coding techniques.