Designing for Interaction on Mobile Devices

Philipp Nägelein

• Publisher: Books on Demand
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9783746007571
• eBook ISBN: 9783752836301
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Management
• Index: Business

Digital technology has fundamentally changed the way humans interact with objects. As a consequence, the focus of product development and design processes has been shifting away from creating physical objects towards designing for interaction with digital objects. Touch-based mobile devices such as smartphones and tablet computers play an essential role in this shift of design paradigms.This cumulative dissertation consists of four essays. First, we provide a holistic overview of research from multiple disciplines on the topic of exploring products through digital touch. Second, we focus on the product perspective and develop a tool that helps organizations to quantify, visualize, and communicate the user experience of their digital products.Third, we explore the digital touch interface per se. Our research provides a better understanding of how digital interaction design, particularly through visual control mechanisms, entails different effects on touch-based mobile devices relative to traditional desktop PCs. Lastly, we focus on the consumer perspective and investigate how goal orientation influences the relationship between different mobile user interfaces, consumer attitudes, and behavioral intentions.

II Article 1

Exploring Products Through Digital Touch:
A Systematic Literature Review¹

Abstract

Nowadays, more and more people shop for products online. This phenomenon presents researchers and practitioners alike with the challenge of how to compensate for haptic product experiences on computer-mediated interfaces. Over the past decade, however, the rapid adoption of mobile touch devices such as smartphones and tablets created new opportunities to provide multisensory virtual product experiences. Our work addresses the following research question: what are the contextual factors and psychological mechanisms driving the digital touch experience? We present a systematic approach to identify, structure, and analyze relevant studies from the disciplines of management, marketing, information systems and psychology. Starting from a total of 142 journals meeting our selection criteria, we narrow down our sample to 31 articles published in 13 different journals. To provide an overview, we map out and discuss product-, interface-, and consumer-related factors influencing the digital touch experience. Lastly, we develop a comprehensive agenda for future research that outlines some of the main theory-, data-, method- and technology-related challenges to be addressed in the coming years.

Keywords: touch, haptics, computer interfaces, mobile, online shopping, literature review

1 Introduction

"Estimates are that it will be fifteen years

before a good replication of touch is perfected.”

CNN Moneyline, 2000

The above statement is cited in Peck and Childers’ seminal work on the role of haptic information and consumers’ individual need for touch when judging products (2003a, 2003b). In the early 2000s, with online shopping and non-touch media on the rise, scholars began to research how to compensate for actual, physical touch of products in computer-mediated interfaces. About fifteen years later, touch-based mobile devices such as tablets and smartphones have been widely adopted, with mobile commerce and ad spending growing rapidly (Bart et al., 2014; Grewal et al., 2016). While it could be argued to what degree a good replication of touch has become possible, a small but growing literature field is analyzing product experience through digital touch.

The general research question guiding this work is the following: What are the contextual factors and psychological mechanisms driving the digital touch experience? So far, we know of no comprehensive and structured analysis addressing the above research question. To address these issues, the objective of this study is to provide a systematic literature review of previous research on touch modalities and mobile shopping – a topic area of interest to multiple disciplines. Hence, we follow a systematic approach as suggested by Webster and Watson (2002), considering peer-reviewed articles published in the disciplines of management, marketing, information systems, and psychology.

Our analytical framework is derived from Peck and Childers (2003b) and distinguishes between product-, interface-, and consumer-related factors influencing digital touch. Specifically, we investigate how these factors influence each other and consumer decisions overall. While management and marketing literature broadly discuss all of three angles, information systems and psychology literature mostly focus on interface- and consumer-related questions.

The remainder of this work is structured as follows. Section 2 introduces our methodological approach, covering our data collection process, analytical framework, and data analysis. Section 3 is divided into two parts. First, we describe the identified literature to structure and map our findings. Second, we analyze the results of the systematic literature review, explaining and analyzing the product-, interface-, and consumer-related factors we identified. A research agenda clustered into theory-, data-, method-, and technology-related challenges follows in Section 4. Section 5 concludes.

2 Methodology

To answer our research question, we conducted a systematic literature review as defined by Jesson et al. (2011) and follow the methodology proposed by Webster and Watson (2002). In this section, we outline our data collection process, analytical framework, and analysis.

2.1 Data Collection

To start with, we defined relevant disciplines: marketing, psychology, information systems, and management. The topic area of digital touch combines a variety of literature streams. In our context, marketing literature discusses the role of product touch in different retail settings. The underlying mechanisms are subject to many studies in consumer psychology. Literature on information systems frequently discusses technology-enabled digital touch mechanisms, and lastly, management literature focuses on the business rather than the consumer perspective. We did not include human computer-interaction literature, since its focus on technological advancements and usability studies is beyond the scope of this review.

Next, we compiled a list of the most relevant peer-reviewed journals within the four disciplines. Therefore, we relied on VHB-JOURQUAL rating (third edition, published in 2015) which is frequently used to assess journal’s reputation and quality in management research (Schrader and Hennig-Thurau, 2009). We focused on the subcategories “management”, “marketing”, and “information systems”, considering all journals awarded with an “A+”, “A”, or “B” rating (see Appendix A.1). Since psychology literature is not covered in the VHB JOURQUAL rating, we used a different measure to identify relevant outlets in this field: the Journal Citation Report by Thomson Reuters (e.g., Lorenz and Löffler, 2015). It calculates a journal’s impact factor, which is based on the average number of its articles’ citations – thus, the impact factor should be considered a measure of relevance rather than quality. Within the social sciences edition, we considered all journals in the area of “multidisciplinary psychology” with an impact factor of 2 or higher (see Appendix A.2). In total, our full list comprises 142 journals, thereof 38 from management, 32 from marketing, 39 from information systems and 33 from psychology.

Then, we searched the SCOPUS database which includes all references and abstracts of the journals under consideration. Our search strategy comprised three steps, summarized in Table 1.

In the first step, we conducted an initial online search using the terms (mobile OR “virtual product experience”) AND (touch OR haptic OR gesture). We defined rather broad search terms to account for the many different expressions that have come with technological advancements duri...

Table of contents

• Notes
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• Table of Contents
• I. Introduction
• II. Article 1: Exploring Products Through Digital Touch: A Systematic Literature Review
• III. Article 2: Quantified UX: Towards a Common Organizational Understanding of User Experience
• IV. Article 3: The Effect of Visual Control Mechanisms on Touch-Based Mobile Devices
• V. Article 4: The Effect of Goal-Oriented Mobile User Interfaces on Consumer Attitudes
• VI. Overall Conclusion
• Copyright