The Cognitive Effect Of Visual Complexity And Task Difficulty On Users Of Mobile Interfaces

With the popularity of smartphones,usability research has gained increasing attention from researchers.However,few studies have focused on the cognitive aspects of mobile interface design,and there has been a controversy about the relationship between visual complexity and user experience in previous studies.Therefore,this paper introduced task difficulty to explore the interaction between visual complexity and task difficulty.In this study,questionnaire and eye tracking method were adopted to study,separately:(1)51 users were invited to complete an online questionnaire to study the effect of different designs of mobile interface on perceived complexity;and(2)36 participants were invited to complete an eye tracking experiment to study their physiological,behavioral,and psychological indexes under different conditions.Finally,this study provided the basis for decision-making of mobile interface design.The main conclusions of this study are:(1)This study clarifies the relationship between perceived complexity and the number of pictures.Perceived complexity increased with the number of pictures,but the area of the picture had no significant effect on it.(2)This study demonstrates that the optimal visual complexity of interfaces would vary from task to task.According to this study:interfaces that require users to search should be as simple as possible;interfaces that need users to extract information should design a medium-visual-complexity interface;however,user performance in browse task was not affected by visual complexity.(3)This study describes the relationship between indexes(physiological,behavioral,and psychological)and cognitive load:the subjective satisfaction is susceptible to external cognitive load(visual complexity),while the duration of fixation,the number of fixations,and the task completion time are more susceptible to internal cognitive load(task difficulty).This study firstly combined task difficulty and visual complexity to study the effect of two factors on aspects of physiology,behavior and psychology,and explained the result through the theory of cognitive load and information processing model.In the perspective of academic study,this study complements Berlyne's theory and explained the contradict of visual complexity study.In the field of interface design,the study reveals that mobile interface designer should first consider the characteristics of the task to be completed,and then plan and design the information amount of interface.