Complementary or redundant? How icon labels and style shape user judgment across cultures and contexts

Purpose In the context of an increasingly competitive mobile app marketplace, app icons function not only as visual signifiers but also as important carriers of functional semantics. From a visual-semantic integration perspective, this research investigates how icon labels (present vs. absent) and icon styles (text-based vs. graphic-based) affect users' perceived semantic fit and download intention, and examines the moderating roles of cultural differences and app type. Design/methodology/approach Three between-subjects experiments (N = 291, 389, 836) were conducted. Study 1 employed a 2 (label) × 2 (style) design to test the core effects and a moderated mediation model with semantic fit as the mediator. Study 2 extended the model by introducing culture as a moderator using parallel experimental procedures in China and Korea. Study 3 incorporated application type as a contextual boundary condition. Data were analyzed using MANCOVA and PROCESS-based moderated mediation analyses. Findings Across studies, icon labels consistently enhanced perceived semantic fit but did not uniformly increase download intention, revealing a trade-off between semantic clarity and visual fluency. Text-based icons strengthened semantic interpretation, whereas graphic-based icons elicited higher download intention through affective appeal. Semantic fit mediated the effect of labels on download intention, with this mediation being stronger for text-based icons. Moreover, cultural and app type significantly shape these mechanisms, Chinese users show a stronger preference for labeled, semantically explicit designs, whereas Korean users favor label-free, visually minimal designs; utilitarian apps are better served by label–text combinations, while hedonic apps benefit more from graphic treatments. Originality/value These findings refine theories of visual-semantic congruency by revealing how cultural cognition and task fit moderate interface-design effects, and provide empirical guidance for cross-cultural app icon design and market localization.