A website which has search and interaction history may be just as engaging as chatting with an online human agent, or a robot helper, researchers including one of Indian-origin have found.
In the study, users of an online movie database site that offered a list of past interactions considered the site just as responsive as one that offered chatbot or human helpers, said S. Shyam Sundar, professor of Communications at University of Pennsylvania in the US.
Businesses that design their websites with this type of history could generate the same level of user absorption as sites with robot and human chat, but without the big budget.
“Highly interactive browsing history can give the user this back-and-forth sense of dialogue that is almost the same as talking with an attentive customer agent,” said Sundar.
“With clever design, you can give the sense of a conversation and the flow of information and that could translate to higher user engagement,” he added.
Browsing history can show users what pages they have recently visited.
Search history — which automatically populates the search field with former web searchers and possible search terms — also can create a sense that a conversation is taking place — also called contingency, or the feeling that the action of a system is in response to the user’s input, researchers said.
“When you go to Google, for example, and just type in a few words, it automatically fills out a number of possible search options based on your past searching,” said Sundar.
Researchers suggest that it was a feeling of contingency, not perception of interactivity on the website, that promoted more user engagement.
According to Sundar, participants rated the sites with a live chat system as more interactive, but this perception did not affect their attitudes toward the site.
“What mattered more is their perception of contingency,” he said.
The findings indicate that interaction history could enhance intelligent assistants, such as Apple’s Siri and Amazon’s Echo, researchers said.
For the study, researchers recruited 110 participants whose ages ranged from 18 to 45 years. They were divided into one of five different conditions, including low interactivity, medium interactivity and high interactivity, as well as chatbot and human chat conditions that were added to the high interactivity condition.
The low interactivity site had no interaction history. The medium interactivity condition featured two most recently browsed and searched movies, while the high interactivity site had a complete list of recently searched and browsed movies.
Researchers asked participants to recommend two movies to be screened at a university classics movie night. They were asked to use the movie website to browse and search for at least six movies to make their decision. In the chat conditions, subjects were asked to browse, search, and chat with the robot or human assistant. The findings were published in the journal Communication Research.
