Effects of visual complexity on user search behavior and satisfaction: an eye-tracking study of mobile news apps

The visual complexity of interface plays a crucial role in user experience. Previous studies have extensively investigated website complexity, while the visual complexity of mobile applications gets seldom attention. This study explored the effect of interface complexity of mobile news apps on user search behaviors and satisfaction by dividing visual complexity into quantity complexity and layout complexity. Thirty-four subjects were invited to take part in the task-oriented eye-tracking experiment. The results revealed that a high level of quantity complexity increased users’ revisit counts, fixation counts, and saccade counts. A high level of layout complexity increased users’ revisit counts and saccade counts while fixation counts decreased first and then increased. Additionally, user satisfaction was negatively correlated with quantity complexity levels, while there was an inverted-U shape between user satisfaction and layout complexity levels. Understanding the effect of visual complexity of mobile news apps on user search behaviors and satisfaction would contribute to providing better guidelines for designers to develop mobile news products with an appropriate complexity layout and improve user satisfaction.