An eye-tracking paradigm to explore the effect of online consumers’ emotion on their visual behaviour between desktop screen and mobile screen

Abstract

ABSTRACT With the exponential growth of mobile smartphones, shopping through them has received considerable attention from online retailers, who wish to offer an interactive and personalised online shopping marketing. However, interactive mobile shopping marketing is still in the early stages of development, and the impact of individual shopping context, such as emotional state of online shoppers’ visual behaviour, is unexplored yet. To address this question, this study adopted the eye-tracking paradigm to examine the ways in which consumers’ pattern of visual attention varies according to their emotional states (positive vs. negative) in mobile screen compared with desktop screen. Results revealed that those with negative emotion paid greater visual attention to online shopping information presented on the mobile and desktop screen than with positive emotion consumers. The gap of the impact of emotional state on consumers’ visual behaviour was more evident in the case of the small screen of mobile device. Regardless of emotional status, visual attention was more highly appeared in mobile screen than desktop screen.