Video moves you: Randomized field experiment shows how in-app videos increase exercise

Despite a booming market for mobile apps, many users abandon them after just one use, which poses challenges for apps that rely on subscription revenue models. Demonstration videos depicting successful behavior by other users may stimulate engagement by new users. Intuitively, such videos should be particularly beneficial to lower-skilled users who do not already know how to perform the behavior. We build on challenge vs. threat appraisal theory to investigate who benefits from demonstration videos and explain how user skill and task difficulty jointly affect engagement. We test our theory with a field experiment embedded in a health and fitness app that randomly blocked demonstration videos in 4.5 million user-exercise pairs. We find demonstration videos benefit users who are well-practiced at a given exercise difficult level, but backfire for those with lower skills. We theorize that lower-skilled users may benefit less from demonstration videos because videos reveal information about the task’s demands that they were unaware of, thus evoking a threat appraisal of the situation. Qualitative evidence collected from app users corroborates the challenge vs. threat appraisal mechanism. Our study contributes to the literature by showing how the design of digital platforms can encourage meaningful engagement and by explaining why providing more information to users can backfire.