A Study Of The Effect Of Website Symmetry And Complexity On User's Recognition Load Based On Eye Tracking Technology

One of the challenges to human-computer interaction is to design an interface that is not only effective but also appealing to users.The website design significantly affects users' online behavior,therefore,making web pages more efficient and improving users' experience is important to the company and designer.As the most important characteristics of website structure,how the website symmetry and complexity influence the users' cognition and emotion is not clear yet.In this study,eye tracking technology and subjective evaluation method were used to detect the effect of the complexity and symmetry of the website on the users' cognitive and emotional mechanisms.The experiments probe into the users' characteristics of habits and interests in website cognition from the aspects of behavior,physiology and psychology.Two experiments were conducted to test the influence of website symmetry and complexity individually firstly;secondly,further experiment was done to testify the hypothesis concluded according to results of the first experiment.That is,how website symmetry and complexity jointly affect users' visual attractiveness and behavior due to different cognitive loads.The participants were asked to conduct a visual search task in a 3(complexity:high,medium and low)*2(symmetry:high and low)mixed within subjects design.The results show that symmetry can moderate the effect of website complexity on users' behavior and visual appearance.Specifically,in condition of low symmetry,users cost less fixation duration,fixation count and task completion time on the medium complexity,and subjective evaluation scores were much higher than the others.However,in condition of high symmetry,users cost less task completion time on high complexity website,although the fixation count,fixation duration as well as pupil size change were the highest,but subjective evaluation scores indicate that the uers had higher emotion on the high complexity website,therefore they stayed longer on the high complexity website.The theory of attention load is used to provide the explanation for the results.The findings provide guidelines for the website managers and designers to maximize users' visual attention.They also provide decision making for the designers and enterprises from both subjective and objective perspectives.