How web design influences user experience: A multi-modal method for real-time assessment during web browsing

The World Wide Web is a place where people can shop, read articles, search for information of all kinds. Like other activities that are carried out by people offline, browsing the Web involves very complex cognitive processes. According to the Cognitive Load Theory, the human cognitive capacity is limited to processing a few pieces of information at a given time, because the cognitive resources available during the execution of a task are limited too. Many authors have pointed out that browsing the Web generally implies a high cognitive load. Interestingly, recent research studies have shown that it is possible to decrease the cognitive load during Web browsing by following specific Web design rule sets and guidelines. Despite this knowledge and the potential relevance of the topic, at the best of our knowledge no study has yet investigated how specific task have an impact in terms of cognitive load and user experience. There is also a lack of knowledge on how web design techniques can actually reduce cognitive load. On the basis of these observations, the proposed study has two main objectives: (1) to investigate the user experience while performing comprehension task on the Web through the adoption of a real-time multi-level assessment, with particular attention on cognitive load; (2) to test the relationship between specific aspects of web design and users experience. The experimental design and protocol of the study will be presented and discussed.