The importance of interface complexity and entropy for online information sharing

Abstract

In this paper, we describe two experiments that show the powerful influence of interface complexity and entropy on online information-sharing behaviour. One hundred and thirty-four participants were asked to do a creativity test and answer six open questions against three different screen backgrounds of increasing complexity. Our data show that, as an interface becomes more complex and has more entropy users refer less to themselves and show less information-sharing breadth. However, their verbal creativity and information-sharing depth do not suffer in the same way. Instead, an inverse U-shaped relationship between interface complexity and creativity as well as information-sharing depth can be observed: users become more creative and thoughtful until a certain tipping point of interface complexity is reached. At that point, creativity and thinking suffer, leading to significantly less disclosure. This result challenges the general HCI assumption that simplicity is always best for computers’ interface design, as users’ creativity and information-sharing depth initially increases with more interface complexity. Our results suggest that the Yerkes–Dodson Law may be a key theory underlying online creativity and depth of online disclosures.

Keywords:

• online information sharing
• disclosure
• interface complexity
• interface design
• entropy
• privacy

Acknowledgements

We want to thank Tijana Gonja for helping to set up the experiment and administering the lab-sessions, Julian Cantella for the English editing of this paper and the excellent reviewers of this paper.