Interactive annual reports reshape how young investors read, not what they think

Interactive annual reports have become a signature of modern investor relations, with companies replacing static PDF documents with HTML microsites full of dynamic visualizations, embedded videos and layered navigation. A new laboratory experiment from the Vienna University of Economics and Business suggests that this glossy upgrade does far less than many communicators assume: it changed how young, non-professional investors read a report, but not what they thought of the company behind it. The study, published in Frontiers in Human Dynamics, combined eye-tracking with surveys to compare two formats of the very same annual report and found a striking dissociation between the reading process and its persuasive outcomes.

The researchers, Laura Hackl and Andreas Enzminger, framed their work around the Elaboration Likelihood Model, a persuasion theory holding that people process messages either through a central route of careful argument scrutiny or a peripheral route guided by surface cues such as design and presentation. Which route dominates depends on a recipient’s motivation and ability. Because annual reports are dense, complex documents, the theory predicts that interactivity could either help less able readers overcome cognitive barriers or simply act as an attractive peripheral cue that flatters the sender without deepening understanding. The team also suspected that financial literacy, the ability to process financial information for decision-making, would determine who falls into which group.

To test this, the researchers ran a between-subjects experiment with 106 participants aged 18 to 44, recruited from Generations Y and Z, the demographic driving the growth of retail investing. Half examined the Hugo Boss 2021 annual report as a classic PDF; half explored it as an interactive HTML microsite. The two versions carried identical text, tables and figures, and the company was among the first in Germany’s DAX index to publish in both formats, earning a Red Dot design award along the way. Participants first browsed the full report for three to five minutes, then completed an eye-tracking task in which screenshots of three chapters, covering capital market information, group strategy and environmental matters, were presented while a Tobii eye tracker recorded their gaze at 60 hertz.

The eye-tracking data revealed the study’s clearest effect: format significantly redistributed visual attention. A mixed analysis of variance showed a strong interaction between format and content category, with a partial eta squared of .223. In the HTML condition, participants devoted a significantly larger share of their attention to body text, tables, headlines and chapter highlights, while the PDF condition drew more attention to charts and figures. Fixation counts and time-to-first-fixation measures confirmed the pattern: HTML readers fixated body text faster and more often, whereas PDF readers reached charts and tables considerably sooner. In short, the interactive layout steered readers toward argument-rich, reading-intensive content, while the static layout pushed them toward quickly graspable visuals.

Yet almost nothing else moved. Perceived usability was descriptively slightly higher for the PDF, though the difference was not statistically significant. Dwell times did not differ significantly in either the open reading or the eye-tracking phase. More importantly, corporate evaluation measured before and after exposure, corporate credibility, and corporate reputation all showed no significant differences between formats. Behavioral intentions followed suit: neither the evaluation of an investment nor the willingness to invest differed significantly across the whole sample. The format, in other words, acted as what the authors call a perceptual rather than a persuasive router, changing the path of the eyes but not the verdict of the mind.

The picture shifted, tentatively, once financial literacy entered the analysis as a moderator. In moderation models that the authors explicitly label exploratory, financial literacy interacted with format on willingness to invest: among participants with comparatively lower literacy scores, the HTML format produced a significantly higher willingness to invest than the PDF, an effect that faded as literacy rose and disappeared entirely among the most literate readers. Crucially, this shift in willingness occurred without any corresponding change in how these readers evaluated the investment itself. The authors note this interaction emerged within a non-significant overall model, explained only a small share of variance, and only reached marginal significance after correction for multiple comparisons, so it demands confirmatory replication.

A parallel, though even weaker, moderation appeared for reading time in the open browsing task, with less literate readers spending longer with the HTML version, but this result did not survive correction for multiple testing or a censoring-appropriate Cox regression. Exploratory heat maps added descriptive color: readers with lower financial literacy concentrated their gaze on the first rows and footnotes of tables, apparently seeking orientation aids, and lingered on bold buzzwords and quotes, a pattern visible in both formats. The authors caution these visualizations are only indicative, since reading intentions were not measured.

The asymmetry in the findings carries an ethical edge that the authors highlight. If an interactive format can nudge willingness to invest among readers who may struggle to critically assess complex financial content, without shifting their informed evaluation of that investment, then format design becomes a question not only of accessibility but of responsibility. The participants in this study were, in fact, comparatively financially literate overall, averaging 15 out of 21 on the OECD/INFE scale, so the moderation concerns readers who were less literate only relative to this well-educated sample, not objectively low-literacy investors. Because the sample was highly educated and digitally fluent, the authors expect that effects among genuinely less literate audiences could be stronger.

The study’s limitations temper its conclusions. It captured only short-term effects in a single laboratory session with a single company’s report; stable constructs like reputation might respond only to repeated exposure. The sample of 53 participants per group offered limited statistical power, and the eye-tracking stimulus used static screenshots, which suppressed the very interactivity that distinguishes HTML reports during free browsing and may have contributed to the null effects on attitudes. The PDF and HTML formats also differ in many ways at once, from navigation to page layout, so the effects cannot be attributed to any single design feature.

For investor relations practitioners, the message is sobering and useful at once. Interactivity is not a self-executing persuasion device; a single exposure to a beautifully designed microsite will not move perceptions of the company. What it does do is route attention, potentially toward the very textual content that supports deeper processing, and tentatively encourage engagement among audiences that static formats may leave behind. Whether that engagement is matched by genuine comprehension, the authors conclude, is the question the industry must now answer before celebrating the interactive annual report as an unqualified step forward.

Subject of Research: The effect of interactive versus PDF annual report formats on young retail investors' perceptions and investment intentions

Article Title: Does format matter? The impact of interactive annual reports on retail investors

Article References: Hackl, L., & Enzminger, A. (2026). Does format matter? The impact of interactive annual reports on retail investors. Frontiers in Human Dynamics, 8, Article 1861829. https://doi.org/10.3389/fhumd.2026.1861829

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3389/fhumd.2026.1861829

Keywords: annual reports, investor relations, eye-tracking, financial literacy, retail investors, Elaboration Likelihood Model, HTML microsites, strategic communication, experiment, persuasion, Does, format