Investigating the Effect of Product Sorting and Users’ Goal on Cognitive load

One of the most important goals of information systems is to minimize users’ mental effort during decision making. Product sorting is a common way of displaying information for online consumers, which is designed to help them in order to find their desired products more efficiently. Product sorting may help users to make their product decision more conveniently depending on the criteria they have for choosing their product. Our goal in this study was to investigate how different product sorting (i.e., alphabetical, price) may decrease users’ cognitive load during product evaluation phase depending on users’ goal (i.e., product name, price). We expect that a match between goal and sorting type will decrease the amount of mental workload necessary for making a product decision compared to a mismatch condition. A two-factor (Product sorting X Users’ goal) within-subject experiment was designed to test the hypotheses. Contributions to research and implications for practice are discussed

More Intelligent Designs: Comparing the Effectiveness of Choice Architectures in US Health Insurance Marketplaces

We examine the effectiveness of alternate choice architectures for health plan choice in US marketplaces under the Affordable Care Act (ACA) using three experiments based on the Health Reform Monitoring Survey: two experiments tested how choice architectures used in presenting information on health plans influenced plan choices and how existing designs could be improved; the third experiment checked the robustness of the choice architecture effects to more naturalistic choice scenarios in which consumers select plans when future medical spending is uncertain. More vulnerable consumers (e.g., worse health, lower literacy) experienced the largest relative improvements when ACA marketplace plans were displayed and sorted by total expected costs for the year rather than premiums (Experiment 1). The benefits of sorting plans by total expected costs was not improved further by making the importance of total expected costs more salient or by providing just-in-time education about such costs (Experiment 2). However, just-in-time education increased the likelihood consumers did not choose a plan, suggesting they may be in the process of updating their plan selection strategy given the new information. Broadly, these results were consistent across alternative scenarios where total expected costs were subject to uncertainty and consistent with expected patterns of consumer behavior under risk aversion (Experiment 3). Thus, a policy-feasible mechanism—sorting health plan options by and highlighting total expected costs—may improve health plan choices, saving money for consumers and the government

Modelling the Effects of Decision Tools in Online Shopping

The provision of tools to focus user interaction in analysing data to come to a decision is the core principle of a decision supporting system. This became the inherent characteristic of decision support systems to counter the cognitive overload issues associated with management information systems arising from their proficiency in gathering and collating into larger and larger reports. A similar issue arises in online shopping systems where increased catalogues become less useful without an ability to use that data to decide upon a purchase. With this in mind we argue that it is necessary now to investigate the optimum decision support tools which may be provided in online shopping systems in order to clarify for the management of these systems how best to help customers analyse and synthesise product data to form a purchase decision. In this paper we propose to investigate the methods of supporting the consumer decision by experiment and survey manipulating the methods of decision support provided and measuring the effects on the consumer decision process. This research in progress outlines the extant theories of consumer decision formation, appropriateness of strategies and the validity of supporting particular strategies. We submit that particular analyses methods should be employed and outline a laboratory experiment which we have designed to test the hypotheses formed