Comfort first: Understanding consumer continuance intention in contactless logistics delivery through human–computer interaction

Contactless logistics delivery (CLD) promises efficiency and cost advantages, yet post-adoption continuance remains underexplored beyond cognition-dominant accounts. Drawing on socio-technical systems (STS), we theorize a cognition → comfort → attachment → continuance pathway in contactless human–computer interaction. Using survey data from 601 Chinese CLD users, we employ covariance-based SEM to test the model and complement it with artificial neural networks (ANN) to probe nonlinearities. SEM indicates that social-system cues (perceived interaction quality, social presence, identification) and technical-system capabilities (personalization, connectedness) jointly foster psychological comfort, which enhances emotional attachment and continuance intention (R2: 0.64 for comfort; 0.10 for attachment; 0.25 for continuance). Mediation tests support chained effects from social/technical cues to continuance via comfort and attachment. ANN results converge with SEM, ranking interaction quality (for comfort) and attachment (for continuance) as the strongest drivers, with stable out-of-sample RMSE. The study advances post-adoption theory by positioning comfort as an emotional bridge in STS and highlights a managerial trade-off: scaling CLD requires balancing technical efficiency with affect-centered experience design.