Research on the Influence of Interface Visual Design Features of Mobile News on Cognitive Load: A Study of Elderly Users in China
PMC12837220
· 10.3390/bs16010032
Gap Declaration
For older users, font color emphasis can significantly reduce cognitive load in interface search tasks. While this study provides valuable insights into how visual complexity and keyword color in mobile news interfaces affect elderly users’ cognitive load, several limitations should be acknowledged to guide future research. First, the sample was limited to 24 urban elderly participants in China with basic app familiarity, potentially restricting generalizability to rural or less tech-savvy seniors; future studies could employ larger, stratified samples across demographics to enhance representativeness. Second, the focus on visual complexity (e.g., layout and item count) and a single moderator (keyword color: red vs. black) overlooked other factors like font size, boldness, or interface novelty, which may interact with cognitive aging; expanding to these elements, perhaps integrating theories like selective attention models, would offer a more comprehensive framework.
Abstract
This study addresses specific gaps in current research on user-experience interface design for news and information apps targeted at elderly users, particularly in the context of human factors and ergonomics. To investigate how interface design features of mobile news clients affect the cognitive load of elderly users, an in-depth analysis was conducted using a combination of objective eye movement tests and subjective evaluation scales. Mobile news client interfaces with systematically varied visual complexity were designed by orthogonally manipulating three core elements identified from top-ranked Chinese news apps and prior literature, and within-subject repeated experiments were performed to collect subjective cognitive load data, objective eye movement data, and behavioral data, valid…
Conclusions / Discussion
6. Conclusions This paper adopts the research method of combining objective measurement and subjective evaluation scale to study the influence mechanism of the interface design features of mobile news client on the cognitive load of elderly users, and the results verify the hypotheses of this study. In this study, the subjective evaluation value, eye-movement index value, and behavior performance index value used to measure users’ cognitive load can reflect the connotation of different interface design features. The higher the visual complexity of interface design, the greater the subjective cognitive load of elderly users, the higher the eye movement index value, and the longer the task completion time. This reflects that the elderly users need to use more cognitive effort and consume more cognitive resources when completing the interface search task with high visual complexity, and that the visual search and information processing time cost is longer. Therefore, in the interface design of mobile news clients for elderly users, the impact of the visual complexity of interface design on cognitive load of elderly users should be considered. The layout of left and right pictures or l…
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