Application overchoice: preliminary lessons from a longitudinal study

The effects of mobile promotions on customer purchase dynamics

Abstract: While mobile promotions have become increasingly popular in recent years, limited research has examined the effects of mobile promotions over time. This research investigates the effects of two popular types of promotional offers, price discount and non-price free sample coupons, on purchase behavior. To this end, we present a dynamic model of customer purchase behavior that incorporates time-varying effects of mobile coupons, enabling us to investigate both the short-term and longer-term effects of mobile promotions. Using transaction and mobile promotion data, we find that both price discount and free sample coupons increase customers' purchase likelihood and expenditures during the coupon redemption period. We also find that free sample coupons have an enduring effect that increases the purchase propensity beyond the promotion period, thereby contributing to incremental purchases over a longer period of time. We demonstrate how our approach can help marketers improve mobile couponing decisions by considering the dynamic effects of mobile promotions that manifest over time.

UbiTtention 2017: 2nd international workshop on smart & ambient notification and attention management

Abstract: In a world moving towards ubiquitous computing, users are increasingly confronted with a tremendous amount of information proactively provided via notifications. Today, notifications are generated by a large number of applications and services, through multiple devices and screens in the users' environment. Thus, human's attention became a significant bottleneck. Further, the latest computing trends with emerging new devices including versatile IoT devices, and contexts, such as smart cities and vehicles, further amplify the challenges. For future computing systems, "attention management", including attention representation, sensing, prediction, analysis and adaptive behavior becomes crucial. Following last year's successful UbiTtention'16 workshop with more than 40 participants, the UbiTtention 2017 workshop brings together researchers and practitioners from academy and industry to explore the managements of human attention and notifications. The workshop considers versatile devices and smart situations to overcome information overload and overchoice.

When choice is demotivating: Can one desire too much of a good thing?

Abstract: Current psychological theory and research affirm the positive affective and motivational consequences of having personal choice. These findings have led to the popular notion that the more choice, the better--that the human ability to manage, and the human desire for, choice is unlimited. Findings from 3 experimental studies starkly challenge this implicit assumption that having more choices is necessarily more intrinsically motivating than having fewer. These experiments, which were conducted in both field and laboratory settings, show that people are more likely to purchase gourmet jams or chocolates or to undertake optional class essay assignments when offered a limited array of 6 choices rather than a more extensive array of 24 or 30 choices. Moreover, participants actually reported greater subsequent satisfaction with their selections and wrote better essays when their original set of options had been limited. Implications for future research are discussed.

My Phone and Me: Understanding People's Receptivity to Mobile Notifications

Abstract: Notifications are extremely beneficial to users, but they often demand their attention at inappropriate moments. In this paper we present an in-situ study of mobile interruptibility focusing on the effect of cognitive and physical factors on the response time and the disruption perceived from a notification. Through a mixed method of automated smartphone logging and experience sampling we collected 10372 in-the-wild notifications and 474 questionnaire responses on notification perception from 20 users. We found that the response time and the perceived disruption from a notification can be influenced by its presentation, alert type, sender-recipient relationship as well as the type, completion level and complexity of the task in which the user is engaged. We found that even a notification that contains important or useful content can cause disruption. Finally, we observe the substantial role of the psychological traits of the individuals on the response time and the disruption perceived from a notification.

The "visual preference heuristic": The influence of visual versus verbal depiction on assortment processing, perceived variety, and choice overload

Abstract: The “visual preference heuristic” suggests that consumers prefer visual to verbal depiction of information in a product assortment. Images produce greater perceptions of variety than text, which is appealing in assortment selection, but can result in choice complexity and overload when choice sets are large and preferences are unknown, suggesting a moderator for Iyengar and Lepper's results. Eye-tracking results reveal that the natural gestalt processing of individual visual stimuli, as compared to the piecemeal processing of individual textual stimuli, affects the processing of the assortment as a whole with visual (compared to verbal) presentation facilitating a faster, though more haphazard, scanning of the assortment. While the less systematic processing that results from visual presentation feels easier, it is not ideal for larger assortments resulting in higher complexity ratings and choice overload than with text depiction. These findings reveal that, like many heuristics, preference for visual depiction may be overapplied.

Google play is not a long tail market: an empirical analysis of app adoption on the Google play app market

Abstract: Distributions of popularity of many online markets have long tails. However, the profitability of the long tail remains in dispute among researchers. With an analysis of an extensive dataset of Google Play transactions, this work first examine the long tail of the mobile application market. Our results suggest that Google Play is more of a "Superstar" market strongly dominated by popular hit products than a "Long-tail" market where unpopular niche products aggregately contribute to a substantial portion of popularity. Blockbuster apps have more downloads, higher ratings and satisfaction ratio. Additionally, we investigate the impact of price on sales of paid apps and find that certain expensive professional apps constitute disproportional large sales. Our findings reveal the unique market structure of the mobile app market, under which the discovery of niche apps is still an intractable task.

Attention and engagement-awareness in the wild: A large-scale study with adaptive notifications

Abstract: In today's advancing ubiquitous computing age, with its ever-increasing amount of information from various applications and services available for consumption, the management of people's attention has become very important. In particular, the high volume of notifications on mobile devices has become a major cause of interruption of users. There has been much research aimed at detecting the opportune moment to present such information to users with in a way that lowers the cognitive load or frustration. However, evaluation of such systems in the real-world production environment with real users and notifications, and evaluation on user's engagement to the presented notification beyond simple responsiveness have not been adequately studied. To the best of our knowledge, this study is the first to investigate user interruptibility and engagement using a real-world large-scale mobile application and real-world notifications consisting of actual news content. We equipped the Yahoo! JAPAN Android app, one of the most popular applications on the national market, with our mobile-sensing and machine-learning-based interruptibility estimation logic. We conducted a large-scale in-the-wild user study with more than 680,000 users for three weeks. The results show that in most cases delaying the notification delivery until an interruptible moment is detected is beneficial to users and results in significant reduction of user response time (49.7%) compared to delivering the notifications immediately. We also observed a higher number of notifications opened in our system as well as constant improvement in user engagement levels throughout the entire study period.