Designing consumer interfaces for experiential tasks: an empirical investigation

In the early adoption phase of business-to-consumer (B2C) ecommerce, the tasks that proved most conducive to online consumer interaction typically were goal-directed, being clear in sequence and structure. A key challenge in ecommerce is the ability to design interfaces that support experiential tasks in addition to goal-directed tasks. Most of the ecommerce research on interface design, however, has focused on goal-directed tasks and has not addressed experiential tasks. Based on the literature from interface metaphors and mental models, this paper explores the use of tangible attributes derived from the physical business domain as a technique for designing an interface that effectively supports experiential tasks. A laboratory experiment was designed and conducted to test the impact of two types of interfaces and business domain familiarity when completing an experiential task. Because consumers need to retain and recall information to evaluate products/services or to make brand associations, retention/recall of information was measured on both the day of the treatment and after a 2-day lag. Results revealed that the interface based upon the business domain metaphor stimulated higher levels of retention and recall of information and thus provided the desired support for experiential tasks. Further, users with weaker domain familiarity showed the greatest improvement in retention and recall, particularly after a 2-day lag, when using the interface with the business domain metaphor design.