Abstract

The increasing complexity of websites poses significant challenges for engaging users and supporting effective information search. It is therefore essential for online businesses to organize and present rich content in ways that align with users’ cognitive styles, ensuring that their experiences are not compromised by website complexity. This research examines how individuals’ culturally grounded holistic and analytic cognitive styles influence their performance, perceptions, and satisfaction as website complexity increases along two dimensions: component complexity and coordinative complexity. Across three studies, we find that individuals with an analytic cognitive style perceive websites with high component complexity as more complex and take longer to locate target information than individuals with a holistic cognitive style. Conversely, individuals with a holistic cognitive style perceive websites with high coordinative complexity as more complex and require more time to find target information than analytic individuals. Moreover, cognitive style interacts with website complexity to shape user satisfaction, with perceived complexity mediating this effect. These findings are observed using both participants’ chronic cognitive styles, proxied by their country of origin, and experimentally activated cognitive styles via priming in bicultural participants. Overall, this research provides a robust theoretical foundation for website acculturation strategies and actionable insights for practitioners aiming to optimize website design for international audiences.

DOI

10.17705/1jais.00990

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