Website Interactivity as Structure: How the Feature Type and Quantity Affect Users' Resource Allocation, and Memor

The first goal of this study was to investigate how complexity (low, moderate, high) of a website's interactive features---icons for downloading and voting, and links to videos and stories---affect information processing of the website's content and users' actual clicking behavior. The second goal of the study was related to the long-term objective of re-conceptualizing website interactive features in terms of their motivational relevance. Grounded in the LC4MP framework and the interactivity literature, a motivational relevance typology of the interactive website features was devised in the current study, based on the types of their motivational function and the amount of resource allocation they call for. This typology was then tested using two indicators of motivational relevance: resource allocation and memory. The results advance the LC4MP framework by placing appetitive motivational relevance into a hierarchy (high to low) across functions which the online media features serve, in this case the functions of interactive features, namely icons for voting, downloading, links to videos, and text hyperlinks to stories.;A two-part experiment was conducted. The first part used static website pictures created by the researcher in order to test how viewers allocated cognitive resources to websites of various complexity levels and it used secondary task reaction response time (STRT) as an indicator of resource allocation. The second part allowed users to explore the actual mock-up websites created by the researcher in order to assess users' browsing patterns and recognition memory for the websites' content. To avoid the familiarity effect artifacts, each participant was shown only one version of the website for each topic (Japan, Peru, Spain) while they were exposed to all three levels of complexity, i.e., each participant explored three websites. The order in which each participant viewed the websites was randomized.;The results revealed that encoding was statistically related to complexity levels and feature types. They suggested that when encoding different feature types, users encoded information presented in low complexity more efficiently than moderate- and high-level complexity. Not only that, but the results also revealed a consistent pattern that, across all complexity levels, icons for voting are encoded the best, followed by icons for download, links to videos, and text hyperlinks to stories. Behavioral data on the time elapsed before the participants first clicked on different features suggest that feature types have an effect on the features to which viewers were first oriented. Users also demonstrated different website information-seeking strategies as a function of complexity levels.;The results the study found on encoding efficiency confirm the direction hypothesized in the motivational relevance typology proposed in the current study. The measures developed in this study lay the groundwork for devising an objective measurement of functionality-as-cue feature-based interactivity. They can be used in other studies as indicators of online message complexity to predict the way(s) users process information associated with interactive features that exhibit the functionalities demonstrated in the current study.