Usability and visual attention distribution with complex, dynamic computer systems: Application to financial trading software

Svetlana Ognjanovic and Christoph Hölscher, ETH Zürich, Switzerland

The typical workplace of a financial trader consists of a multi-screen setup with dynamic streams of real-time information. This critical decision environment puts strong demands on visual attention, information filtering, reasoning and decision-making under time pressure, and can enforce cognitive biases. Financial traders focus on the information that appears relevant to them based on their previous experience and/or their market expectations while also ignoring other available pieces of information. This can lead to false assumptions and biases on the individual but also on the market level. The present PhD project aims to address those cognitive biases and make them measurable.

paper 8