We conducted an online study with 165 participants in which we tested their search efficiency and information recall. We confirm that the visual complexity of a website has a significant negative effect on search efficiency and information recall. However, the search efficiency of those who preferred simple websites was more negatively affected by highly complex websites than those who preferred high visual complexity. Our results suggest 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.
https://doi.org/10.1145/3313831.3376849
The ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (https://chi2020.acm.org/)