Design Element Preferences in Public Facilities: An Eye Tracking Study

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

After reviewing the article, I have some comments below.

·        I think public facilities and signage systems are more related to street-level urban design than landscape architecture.

·        Is there any reason for choosing China in general and Xifang Village in particular? Does the context of this village have any impact on the study?

·        The authors haven’t justified why they have a hypothesis on gender in the subjective preferences.

·        Most of the figures do not have brief mentions of them in the text preceding their placements. Authors cannot assume that readers can be able to understand which figure is for which part of the manuscripts.

·        The article focuses on the logo, but I think its solid areas are not enough to reflect the changes in the materials. All the variations in Figure 5 are almost identical for each colour if looking from a certain distance.

·        The authors should explain more about the calculations of sample size. Which population does this sample represent? Especially, when it comes to comparing groups (males and females, design majors and non-design majors) you need to have enough statistical power. Do you expect the distribution to be normal? Also, what are the sampling methods and processes to avoid bias after knowing the sample size?

·        I think the authors should consider rewriting the result section. A results section should simply present the findings in an academic and unbiased manner, avoiding any attempt at analysing, explaining, or interpreting them. For example, the sentences from line 309 to line 320 should be moved to the discussion section.

·        Some figures in the result section do not have the units with them. Also, I don’t think Figure 8 and Figure 9 are tables.

·        There is a subsection in line 396 without content.

·        The discussion section starts with a quick summary of the methods, which is not necessary.

·        Writing style, sometimes, is repetitive and not clear enough. For example, from lines 430 to 435: “This indicates …. This proves…..It proves….”.  Do “this” and “it” here both mean “the experiment”?

·        Several parts in the discussion section lack logical statements/arguments. For example, the part that explains the relationship between culture and gender in colour and material preference is not convincing.  The authors claimed there are cultural reasons and gave the example of the perspectives of white colouring in West and East Asia, however, it’s clearly not the reason for the difference in colour preference between men and women. It only shows women may have a similar preference to Western people.

Overall, I think the study has a good research approach and the experiment has been properly conducted. However, the manuscript still has several issues, hence, it was not able to present the ideas and results in an academic manner.

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 2 Report

General comments:
It was a pleasure to read and review this interesting research. The authors investigated the influence of logo color and material on the participants’ visual attention and their preferences. The findings suggest that color had a higher impact than material. I believe this topic could be interesting for a broad range of researchers, especially for those involved in graphic design, architecture and signage. Generally, the article has a good structure and it is grounded in the current literature. Still, I suggest revising some parts of the manuscript.

Specific comments:
1. Lines 412, 422: The descriptions of the hypotheses 1 and 2 are not consistent with the description of the same hypotheses in Lines 146-148. Pay attention to the independent and dependent variables in the hypotheses’ formulation.
2. Lines 231-237: Please explain the experimental procedure in a more detail. How was the experimental procedure started? Was there any warm-up stimulus? Was any step taken in the procedure to assure that the participant’s’ attention was focused on the center of the screen before the test stimuli appeared? Please clarify what you mean by “only the first picture seen in each group was recorded”? Does this mean that the experimenter recorded and analyzed eye-tracking data only for the AOI which was first noticed by each participant?
3. Lines 258-265: Please explain how the attention rate was calculated.
4. Lines 280-281: The authors refer to Table 2, but there is no Table 2 in the manuscript. Furthermore, the authors should explain precisely how they “combined the data of various location logos”.
5. Figures 10, 11, 12, 13: In the figure description, please specify the variable for which you presented the mean values. In the description of Figure 14, please specify the dependent variable presented by the graph. In the description of Figures 8 and 9 specify clearly which exact indicators the figures present.
6. Lines 384-393: The chapter “3.5. Verification” appears unpredictably, and may confuse a reader. I would recommend describing the methodology for verification earlier in the paper, in the section which describes materials and methods. Another option could be to divide this chapter into two parts: “3.5.1. Verification methodology” and “3.5.2. Verification results”.
7. Lines 430-432: It would be beneficial if the authors provided research-based reference(s) to support their conclusion about the relationship between longer viewing time and memory.
8. According to Lines 413-415, Lines 423-425, and Lines 439-447, it seems that the authors used some kind of a qualitative research method. If that is the case, then they should describe all the specifications of the qualitative method used in the study.

Minor changes:
9. Line 116: Please define the meaning of abbreviations SRT and ART.
10. Line 135: Avoid informal terms such as “wow”.
11. Line 190: It seems that a color name for the values (RGB100, 103, 108) is missing.
12. Lines 204-205: Acrylic is missing in the sentence which describes the material variables.
13. Figures 4, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 13: Change ‘Mental’ to ‘Metal’.
14. Line 396: Remove ‘3.1. Subsection’

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Round 2

Reviewer 1 Report

After revising, the manuscript has been improved a lot and can be accepted.

Just a minor comment is that the authors still haven't described clearly the sampling method. What is your population? How did you select that population? Did you divide the population into four clusters first then select 15 from each? If yes, how did you select that 15? Randomly?

Author Response

Response to Reviewer 1 Comments

Point 1： Just a minor comment is that the authors still haven't described clearly the sampling method. What is your population? How did you select that population? Did you divide the population into four clusters first then select 15 from each? If yes, how did you select that 15? Randomly?

Response 1: Sampling methodology clarified based on review comments: “From a demographic point of view, the eye movement experimental design was divided into males and females based on gender, professionals (design juniors and above), and non-professionals based on professional ability. There were 15 male professionals, 15 female professionals, 15 male non-professionals, and 15 female non-professionals, for 60 subjects in the four categories (each category was randomly selected while supplies lasted, and there were no significant differences in the remaining demographic characteristics).” (Line:226-232)

Author Response File: Author Response.docx