A Study On The User Visual Search Performances For Web Design

The objective of this study was to investigate the effect of web portals page design onweb users' visual search performances. Based on previous literature on visual search andweb page user interface design, the influences of different web page visual design modes andweb page animation presentation were studied.Therefore, two experiments were conducted to test the hypotheses.Experiment I studied the overall effects of two different web page visual design modes(information overweight and lightweight) and two language systems (Chinese and English)on web users' visual search performances in 3 variables (performance time, errors andsatisfaction). 28 Chinese participants and 14 German participants were randomly assigned tothree groups to perform visual search tasks on two simulated web pages.Experiment II investigated the effects of different animation combination on users'visual search performances in the web environment. 70 Chinese participants were recruitedfor experiment II. The dependent variables were task performances (mean performance time,errors), animation recognition, satisfaction and animation perception, etc.The main results of the study indicated the followings:For Chinese and German web users, the visual search performance time dramaticallyincreased when targets showed on the web page with heavy-information and strong visualstimuli while errors and satisfaction did not markedly deteriorate. For Chinese web users,language effect did not have the significant influence on users' visual search performances.For Chinese web users, performance time significantly increased when targets showedon the web page with random floating square animation rather than those with coupletanimation and no animation while attention disturbance did not lead to higher error rates andbetter recognition. Finally, the examination of the satisfaction score showed no significantdifference among different animation combination presented. Further comparison resultsrevealed that the satisfaction had significant decrease for the participants with randomfloating animation web pages rather than no animation condition.