Companies are increasingly including innovative visual design elements such as animations and pictographs in digital communication. While both elements can be beneficial in exchanges with their customers, we propose that combining them can have negative effects on communication effectiveness. Animations and pictographs enhance digital communication, essentially through increased perceptions of enrichment, but these elements also raise perceptions of clutter. As they enrich a message in unique ways, processing these different types of visual design elements requires distinct cognitive resources such that, when combined, clutter perceptions dominate the recipient’s perceptions and behaviors, thus paradoxically offsetting their positive effects. This interplay may not only undermine message outcomes but even spill over to downstream behavioral outcomes. In a large-scale randomized field experiment in cooperation with a mobile app company, we find that including animations (GIFs) and pictographs (emojis) together damages message outcomes (increasing unsubscriptions) and downstream outcomes (reducing in-app time) compared with what happens when these elements are deployed separately. We elaborate on the processing of the text and visual elements from this field experiment in two lab experiments, including an eye-tracking study. Finally, in two further online studies, we seek to establish whether the proposed mechanisms depend on the number of visuals or the types of pictographs employed.

公司越来越多地在数字通信中包含创新的视觉设计元素，例如动画和象形文字。虽然这两个元素在与客户的交流中都有好处，但我们建议将它们结合起来会对沟通效率产生负面影响。动画和象形文字增强了数字交流，主要是通过增加对丰富的感知，但这些元素也增加了对混乱的感知。当它们以独特的方式丰富信息时，处理这些不同类型的视觉设计元素需要不同的认知资源，这样，当它们结合在一起时，杂乱的感知会主导​​接收者的感知和行为，从而矛盾地抵消了它们的积极影响。这种相互作用不仅会破坏信息结果，甚至会蔓延到下游的行为结果。在与一家移动应用公司合作的大规模随机现场实验中，我们发现包括动画 (GIF) 和象形文字 (emojis)与单独部署这些元素时发生的情况相比，共同损害消息结果（增加取消订阅）和下游结果（减少应用内时间） 。我们在两个实验室实验中详细说明了该现场实验中文本和视觉元素的处理，包括眼动追踪研究。最后，在两项进一步的在线研究中，我们试图确定所提出的机制是否取决于视觉效果的数量或所使用的象形文字的类型。