Print Email Facebook Twitter Should product innovations look simple or complex? The effects of visual complexity on consumers' comprehension of product innovations Title Should product innovations look simple or complex? The effects of visual complexity on consumers' comprehension of product innovations Author Cheng, P. Mugge, R. Faculty Industrial Design Engineering Department Product Innovatie Management Date 2015-11-02 Abstract Consumers often have difficulty understanding the really new functions of product innovations. This study explores the potential role of product appearance, and more specifically visual complexity, to improve consumers’ comprehension of product innovations. Because visual complexity is directly determined by designers, it is essential to equip designers with the knowledge of how visual complexity influences consumers’ comprehension. We propose that a visually complex product appearance will result in a state of congruity with really new functions of the product innovation. Our results reveal that due to this congruity for really new products, a visually complex product appearance can improve consumers’ comprehension of the product innovation in comparison to a visually simple product. For an incremental new product, no effects for visual complexity were found. Subject product appearanceproduct innovationconsumer responsevisual complexity To reference this document use: http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:c3087e64-0cde-4b1a-a22b-b04115a7dcd9 Publisher IASDR ISBN 978-0-646-94318-3 Source Proceedings of the IASDR 2015 Congress Interplay, Brisbane, Australia, 2-5 November 2015 Part of collection Institutional Repository Document type conference paper Rights (c) 2015 The Author(s) Files PDF 321960.pdf 495.82 KB Close viewer /islandora/object/uuid:c3087e64-0cde-4b1a-a22b-b04115a7dcd9/datastream/OBJ/view