Impact of website complexity and task complexity on older adult’s cognitive workload on mobile devices

Abstract

This study focused on older adults’ cognitive workload of mobile devices. An experiment was conducted to investigate the influence of website complexity and task complexity on users’ visual search behavior. 15 older adults needed to perform a simple shopping task and a complex shopping task on different mobile websites in this experiment. Three findings were derived. First, compared with simple tasks, participants spent more time on complex tasks and experienced heavier mental workload; Second, the color of mobile websites did affect participants’ workload on the websites with fewer links whereas it did not affect participants’ workload on the websites with more links, and 85 % of the participants preferred the mobile websites with color; Third, as the number of links on the mobile websites increased, participants spent more time in finding the target and experienced heavier mental workload.