Exploring the Effects of Multidimensional Context on Human Performance in Personal Bookmark Management

This paper presents an exploratory study in comparing the gender difference of how Taiwanese university students interacted and organized their bookmarks under 2D and 3D conceptual prototyping. Participants were asked to execute a set of online tasks for bookmark management and take screenshots to further ground the findings. The results showed that 62% of the female participants preferred the 2D context and there was no significant difference between the 2D and 3D tasks in terms of their time taken, which indicated that they maintained the consistency of their task performance strategy and were not subject to the change of spatial dimension. In contrast, the male participants performed poorly in the 3D context, as opposed to the 2D environment, even though they stated that they preferred the 3D context. A possible explanation for this might be that most of the male participants (mean age 21.8 years, ) are regular 3D game players. Therefore, they tend to unconsciously prefer 3D over 2D. Although the null hypothesis was not disproved, the task time results showed a degree of significance in terms of gender and spatial context differences, which requires further investigation.