Web-sites structure characteristics and human cognitive functions

College students examined the relations between Web-site design/structure and cognitive performance. In Study 1, nineteen subjects evaluated 283 Web-sites of university department and found that two axes, surface design of two dimensional complexity and structure design of three dimensional complexity contribute to the evaluation of Web-site impression. In Study 2, twenty-one students joined a memory experiment to investigate which axis contributes to the understanding and memory of Web-site. The results suggest that the contribution of each axis depends on the nature of contents (general and specific) and the cognitive attributes (understanding and memory). The axis of Web-site structure contributes to both understanding and memory for general information but the axis of Web-site surface design contributes only to the understanding, not to the memory function.