Implications of cross-cultural design for usability and A/B testing
Cultural background affects visual preferences, which in turn impacts how quickly people navigate websites and how much information they can remember.
When I lived in Argentina during my undergrad, I began to notice how much of the tech industry was centered in the US. I noticed how different international corporations created small adaptations to their businesses depending on their locations, and I wondered how US-centric tech services (like Yelp, or Google Maps, which I hardly used in Argentina) might need to adapt to different populations and culture.
In graduate school, I started to learn about how culture influences how people perceive web design. One of those differences is that some people prefer higher “visual complexity” or density of content, whereas others don’t. My co-authors and I wondered if these differences in UI preferences also impact how users find and remember information on the web.
Why does visual complexity matter in cross-cultural design?
Cross-cultural researchers challenge the “one-size-fits-all” approach to web design, arguing for more culturally-sensitive website adaptations. For instance, perhaps websites with a global user-base should adapt their website’s design to the country a user is accessing from, because:
- People’s ideas of how beautiful a website varies based on their demographic background, such as gender, education, and country of origin.
- These perceptions of appeal are important, as they impact user trust and intention to use a website (such as intent to purchase).
- A website’s “visual complexity” or level of clutter and information on a page, is one of the most important predictive factors of people’s perceptions of a website’s beauty, along with colorfulness.
We were interested in how these differences in perceptions of aesthetics impact how people navigate websites. Specifically, we investigated whether users’ visual preferences reflect which type of website they can use most efficiently and remember best.
Impact of Visual Complexity on Search Time and Information Recall
Study Design
We conducted an online study with 165 participants in which we tested their time to find information and ability to remember information depending on the level of visual complexity they preferred. This was deployed on Lab in the Wild, a volunteer-driven research platform with users from all over the world.
Time to Find Information
We found that the visual complexity of a website increases time spent finding information, regardless of preferences. However, those who preferred simple websites were more negatively affected by highly complex websites than those with other preferences.
Information Recall
Participants generally answered the most questions correctly from low complexity websites, and the least from high complexity websites, regardless of preferences. However, people who preferred high visual complexity remembered more from medium complexity websites than people who preferred low complexity.
Implications
Our analyses show that regardless of preferences, people can generally work best with simple, low complexity websites. However, our analyses also showed that visual preferences do affect performance — those who prefer low complexity are more negatively affected by highly complex websites, and they remember less from medium complexity websites compared to those who prefer a higher visual complexity. Therefore, we recommend designers carefully consider how the complexity of their web designs will affect users with varying preferences.
Reduce Visual Complexity to Increase Efficiency and Memory
First, our results show that website complexity negatively impacts performance, even for a relatively diverse sample, which suggests that when efficiency is important, designers should strive to reduce the visual complexity of their website to a minimum. Designers can do this by reducing their website’s text, images, and colorfulness to the most necessary components to improve search efficiency and recall.
Baseline Metrics: Avoid Bias Against User Groups
When evaluating performance on user interfaces, visual preferences may inadvertently have a differential effect on users’ performance. Therefore, when designing A/B tests or time-constrained education software, designers should assess visual preferences or choose a medium complexity website layout, as this is where all people converge on time-based performance. Otherwise, users may be unfairly disadvantaged due to their visual preferences.
How much people like the aesthetics of a website impacts how quickly they can navigate it and how much information they remember. In particular, people who like low complexity websites find information much more quickly at low complexity and are hurt more by high visual complexity than those with preferences for higher complexity websites. This suggests that diverse visual preferences need to be accounted for when assessing search response time and information recall in HCI experiments, testing software, or A/B tests.
If you’d like to know more, check out our CHI 2020 paper, “Keep It Simple: How Visual Complexity and Preferences Impact Search Efficiency on Websites.” You can also find me on Twitter!
