Designing for Diagnosticity and Serendipity: An Investigation of Social Product-Search Mechanisms

Abstract

Users are increasingly sharing their product interests and experiences with others on e-commerce websites. For example, users can "tag" products using their own words, and these "product tags" then serve as navigation cues for other users who want to search for products. Also, socially endorsed information contributors are sometimes highlighted on websites and serve as direct information sources. This study examines the effects of these two distinct social product search cues, product tags and socially endorsed people, on users' perceived diagnosticity and serendipity of their product search experience. While product tags support product navigation via a variety of product features tagged by the community, access to socially endorsed people enables users to browse diverse and high-quality alternatives favored by these individuals. We constructed an experimental website using real data from one of the largest social-network-based product-search websites in China to conduct an empirical study. The results of this study show that product tags help users to locate and evaluate relevant alternatives, thus enhancing the perceived diagnosticity of product search, whereas the integration of product tags and access to socially endorsed people enables users to conduct even more serendipitous searches. In addition, both perceived diagnosticity and perceived serendipity of a search experience positively affect users' decision satisfaction.

Social Media Integration and E-Commerce Platform Performance: A Randomized Field Experiment

“…comparable platforms) and endogeneity in platforms' integration decisions, and allows us to identify the causal effect of Facebook comments system on users' shopping behavior, and the platform's financial performance. Further, our results add to literature on online platform design , Xiao and Benbasat 2015, Yi et al 2017. Our results suggest that social media integration is a valuable design option for ecommerce platforms (when there are enough comments).…”

Sustainability in Online Video Hosting Services: The Effects of Serendipity and Flow Experience on Prolonged Usage Time

“…Many scientific discoveries have been attributed to serendipity [20]. Studies of serendipity have also been developing in different disciplines, such as the history of medicine, history of science, information systems, and others [16,[20][21][22].…”

With a little help from my friends: Cultivating serendipity in online shopping environments

“…Yet recent research has sparked new hope by observing that social features such as consumer-generated product tags and lists of socially endorsed shoppers could foster serendipitous product search experiences (Yi et al 2017). These findings have revealed an opportunity to examine the role of social features in inducing serendipity in online shopping environments.…”

“…Walpole explains that he was struck by the fortuitous discoveries these three princes made during their travels and that he decided to use the term serendipity to refer to such accidental events one experiences (Merton 1968). Since then, interest in serendipity has developed in several fields such as the philosophy and history of science (Roberts 1989), medicine (Sojo et al 2014), computer science (André et al 2009), library and information science (Foster and Ford 2003), marketing (Stephen Brown 2005), entrepreneurship (Dew 2009), and information systems (Yi et al 2017). Our review of the definitions of serendipity (Table 1) shows that despite a few specificities related to the contexts in which serendipity is being studied, two defining properties appear to be fundamental: unexpectedness and value.…”

“…To address this concern, we explore the potential value of online shopping environments that cultivate serendipity, that is, the finding of unexpected but valuable product-related information. Online retailers increasingly value serendipity because it is a significant driver of consumers' decision satisfaction (Yi et al 2017), positive affect (Matt et al 2014), and engagement (Sun et al 2013). The concept of serendipity is relatively nascent in the Information Systems (IS) field, but several other fields (e.g., marketing, medicine, and engineering) have long recognized the important role it has played in various scientific contexts including the discovery of gravity, penicillin, and computerization (Anguera de Sojo et al 2013;Kubinyi 1999;Roberts 1989;Van Andel 1994).…”