The Roles of Visual Complexity and Order in First Impressions of Webpages: An ERP Study of Webpage Rapid Evaluation

ABSTRACT

Users’ first impressions of a website have a great impact on their subsequent behaviors and attitudes toward the website. Visual complexity and order are two key factors of webpage design that influence users’ first impressions of webpages. Consequently, we investigated those factors in the present study, using an event-related potential (ERP) technique to analyze users’ evaluative processing. The results show that website complexity and order evaluations were processed within 100–160 ms, influencing N1 amplitude, which is an ERP component related to early visual attention resource allocation. Webpages higher in complexity and order received more attentional resources than did lower ones. Webpage complexity and order continued to have an influence on P2 amplitude in the 160–240 ms period, which may reflect users’ subsequent information processing and emotional evaluations. More cognitive resources were needed for information processing for the low-order webpages, and more positive feelings were evoked by low-complexity webpages than by high-complexity webpages. Subsequently, webpage complexity and order also influenced P3 amplitude in the time interval of 300–440 ms, suggesting an influence on explicit attentional resource allocation. In detail, the ERP results suggest that participants may prefer low-complexity webpages because those webpages evoked positive emotional experiences and that they were inclined to allocate more attention resources to information processing for low-order webpages than for high-order ones. The results of this study provide evidence from brain activity that webpage complexity and order are processed quickly and, as a consequence, likely influence users’ first impressions. The findings suggest that to induce positive first impressions, designers should adopt well-ordered webpages for attracting users’ attention and low-complexity webpages for inducing positive emotional responses.

Acknowledgments

We thank all the participants for carrying out the experiments. In addition, we thank Xiaoning Liang and Laurent Muzellec for their help in the process of writing the manuscript. Further, we thank the editor and anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments and advice.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by National Natural Science Foundation of China [Grant no. 71701003], The First Batch of 2020 MOE Industry-University Collaborative Education Program [Grant no. 202002035012, Kingfar-CES “Human Factors and Ergonomics” Program], and The University Natural Science Research Key Project of Anhui Province [Grant no. KJ2017A108].

Notes on contributors

Weilin Liu

Weilin Liu is an associate professor at the School of Management Engineering at Qingdao University of Technology, Qingdao, China. She received her Ph.D. degree in Management Science and Engineering from the Northeastern University at Shenyang in 2017. She specializes in user experience and emotional design.

Yaqin Cao

Yaqin Cao is an associate professor from the Department of Industrial Engineering at Anhui Polytechnic University, Wuhu, China. She received her Ph.D. degree in Management Science and Engineering from the Northeastern University at Shenyang in 2014. Her research interests include emotional design, user experience design, and human-computer-interaction.

Robert W. Proctor

Robert W. Proctor is a distinguished professor in the Department of Psychological Sciences at Purdue University and Fellow of Purdue’s Center for Education and Research in Information Assurance and Security. He received his Ph.D. in experimental psychology from the University of Texas at Arlington in 1975.