Applying multiscale entropy for evaluating website visual complexity in an agile project: Using physiological data

The perceived visual complexity of a website immediately and persistently impacts the user experience. However, existing visual complexity research methods in the literature are not suitable for agile website development, often associating visual complexity with website structure and requiring advanced programming skills and large participant samples. This study proposes an accessible, definition-independent method to evaluate website complexity using multiscale entropy analysis of physiological signals. Our results show that the multiscale entropy derived from physiological data can effectively differentiate websites with varying complexity levels, even with a small number of participants. This approach achieves robust and significant effects, enabling its simultaneous application with user experience assessment in the agile website development process. The proposed MSE-based method provides an objective, unified tool to evaluate visual complexity without the burden of defining and calculating visual complexity, allowing design teams to focus on the website itself during agile software development projects.