The effect of violating visual conventions of a website on user performance and disorientation: how bad can it be?

This experiment investigates what happens to user performance and disorientation when visual conventions of a genre are violated. It also looks at what happens to the user performance and disorientation over time. Twenty-eight participants were randomly allocated to two independent groups: one was tested with a conventional website and the other with a convention-violating website. The study comprised of two parts and on each part participants were tested on a different website. Results showed that in the first part participants who used the violating site performed worse and were more disoriented than participants who used the conventional version. But the performance of the participants of the convention-violating group improved over time so that by the end of the first part performance on both groups were equivalent. In the second part performance and disorientation on both groups were equivalent suggesting that users might rapidly adapt to visual convention violations.

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