The correlation between visual complexity and user trust in on-line shopping: Implications for design

Abstract

Perceived visual aesthetics of a web site positively affects a user's credibility assessment of the site and less visual complex web page is associated with more favorable attitudes toward the page. Here we further investigate whether the visual complexity of a web site affects its aesthetic preference and as a consequence is associated with the users' credibility. Two experiments with on-line payment scenario were conducted. Experiment 1 shows users trust pages with higher text-based complexity more. Experiment 2 shows perceived image-based complexity is negatively correlated with credibility. Our results show text-based complexity and image-based complexity have different effects on the credibility of on-line shopping site. Designers can decrease image-based complexity of a web site to increase users' aesthetic preference and trust. This work can serve as the fundament to develop an automatic evaluation tools to predict the users' trust and preference of a web page based on the visual complexity computation. © 2014 Springer International Publishing.