Enticing Consumers via Incomplete Product Experience: An Investigation of Online Product Interactivity Designs

This paper reports on two studies that investigate the design of online product interactivity. The first study compares three different presentation formats: a video presentation and two Virtual Product Experience (VPE) presentations, namely, triggered interaction and full interaction. The findings suggest that triggered interaction VPE is more effective in enticing users to attend to and further explore the featured products than both the non-interactive video presentation and the full interaction VPE. The second study builds upon the first and focuses on two specific VPE design factors. In particular, it investigates interaction constraint (high versus low constraint) in addition to the activation mode of interaction (process-based interaction versus event-based interaction). The results reveal interesting interaction patterns between the two design factors, i.e., providing less constrained interaction performs better when process-based interaction design is adopted, but performs worse when event-based interaction is employed.