Examining visual cognitive complexity in the context of online women's magazine home pages

Abstract

An experiment (N=48) on 18 to 30 year-old women was run to see how the visual cognitive complexity of digital women's magazines' home pages affects the cognitive processing of individuals and their evaluations of the sites. A content analysis of 13 online magazines was conducted and six magazine sites were chosen for the experiment and put in the complexity levels of low, medium, and high. There were two sites per level. Visual cognitive complexity did not affect the time it took participants to select a story or recognition. Additionally, perceived complexity did not match up to the levels operationally defined in the content analysis. The original measures were based off of Lang's concept of information introduced (I²). Although the hypotheses were not significant, a lot of insight can be gained about how to operationally define visual cognitive complexity. Although, the measure presented here did not yield significant results, there are ideas presented on how to build off this measure and create new measures for the future. This research is a starting point on studying visual complexity from a cognitive standpoint. .