SYNOPSIS:

This article reports on an experiment that varied types of decision tasks and displays of multi-cue financial information to test their effects on decision making performance and user perceptions about display use. Specifically, it was hypothesized that object displays should improve relative performance and enhance user experience when subjects must combine multi-cue information to arrive at a decision (an integrative task). In contrast, when subjects must selectively attend to one cue in a multi-cue information set (a selective task), non-object displays should improve relative performance and enhance user experience. The first hypothesis was not supported, but the second was strongly supported, which suggests that it is important to consider the nature of the decision task when designing the display of financial accounting information.