Influence of Content Layout and Motivation on Users' Herd Behavior in Social
Discovery
Supporting Information Seeking
/
Yue, Yanzhen
/
Ma, Xiaojuan
/
Jiang, Zhenhui
Proceedings of the ACM CHI'16 Conference on Human Factors in Computing
Systems
2016-05-07
v.1
p.5715-5719
© Copyright 2016 ACM
Summary: Social product discovery is an emerging paradigm that enables users to seek
information and inspiration from peer-contributed contents. Researchers have
observed herd behaviors in social discovery, i.e., basing beliefs and decisions
on what similarly situated others have done. In this paper, we explore the
effects of content layout and motivation on users' herd behaviors in social
discovery. We conduct an eye-tracking study with 120 participants to compare
goal- and action-oriented users' behaviors on a grid versus waterfall style
social discovery site. The results show that users have a higher tendency to
herd on a grid-style website, more so for goal-oriented users.