Does the type of device consumers use to shop online impact the way consumers make purchase decisions?
That’s one of several questions posed by two Boston College researchers as they finished an initial study on touch screens and decision criteria in regard to online choices. The area of focus for Dr. Adam Brasel and Dr. James Gips is “interface psychology,” which is “how the differences in the interface used to access technology affect the thought process and behavior of the person using the interface,” Brasel said.
Their thesis is framed by the idea that consumers’ online behavior is different when they’re using a tablet versus a laptop or a mobile phone. In their initial study, the researchers note that tablets and mobile devices account for about 60 percent of all Web traffic (including device- or native-based apps). And increasingly, consumers are making purchasing decisions and actual purchases on a mobile device.
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“Yet research on the effects of smartphones and tablet usage in computing has largely focused on how to make online search easier on mobile devices,” Brasel explained. “Moving from desktops and laptops to tablets and smartphones has seen a fundamental shift in interface from mouse and trackpad to a direct-touch interface where users are touching images of objects directly on the screen rather than touching the mouse or trackpad. This interface shift is important to explore, as interfaces fundamentally change the experience of the content they are used to access.”
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The two dug into existing research findings in this area and learned that touching an object on a screen “is a direct visual metaphor for the act of touching content itself, similar to touching an object in the real world, when compared to the more indirect touch of using a mouse or trackpad to control screen content.” They also discovered that when a user imagines touching an object, it “activates imagery processing, which in turn cues mental simulation of that object’s behavior; in essence, simulated or imagined touch generates effects highly similar to actual touch.”
Armed with prior research and analysis, the professors conducted a study with 63 participants who were given a gift certificate to a travel Web site along with different devices. They were told to research hotels for a Parisian vacation. The gestures of the participants and transactions were coded, and the results showed that while the mouse participants and touch-screen ones spent the same amount of time on researching, the “direct-touch interface participants felt as if they spent longer on the task when asked to recall how long the task took.” The touch-screeners also visited more hotel Web sites.
And when it came to tangible perceptions, the results were startling. “Direct-touch participants were nearly twice as likely as mouse participants to mention tangible elements of the room as instrumental in making their decision; 56 percent of touch-screen responses versus 32 percent of mouse responses,” the researchers said. “Consistent with a bias toward sensory information engendered by a touch interface, touch-screen participants also rated images as significantly more important in their decision-making process than the mouse participants.”
Moreover, the touch-screen participants were more engaged and had higher overall satisfaction with their task than the mouse users.
Brasel and Gips realized that the implications of their lab study on online shopping is vast, but more research is needed. “These findings provide a ground-level exploration of how the shift from mice to touch screens may affect online behavior,” they wrote in their research article. “A connected research question is whether the touch-screen shift in attribute focus to more tangible dimensions can be moderated by environmental variables.”
In regard to product categories tested, the researchers wondered if the results would differ for shopping for sweaters, for example, or cell phone service.