The university library databases are an important channel for accessing information resources, and the existing studies focus on the aesthetic experience of the interface system, but neglect the logic and comprehensibility of visual information representations, leading to the problem of inefficient user information retrieval. The controlled experiment was used to investigate the impact of procedural knowledge-based visual representations and user types on the performance, cognitive load and satisfaction of information retrieval tasks in university library databases. Procedural knowledge-based visual representations had significant impact on cognitive load, task performance and subjective ratings, and user type and procedural knowledge-based visual representations had an interactive effect on cognitive load and task performance. Novice users were most efficient at retrieval when using drop-down visual representations, and veteran users were better suitable for using combined visual representations. The the design basis can be provided for the retrieval interface by improving the efficiency of users' information retrieval in the database.