Navigate Through Massive and Mixed Online Reviews: The Role of Central and Peripheral Cues in Consumers’ Information Search

Abstract

While many studies have investigated the impact of central and peripheral cues on the perceived helpfulness of a single online consumer review, few studies have examined how central or peripheral cues may affect consumers’ search for reviews to read from massive reviews and how this knowledge can be explored in the interface design of online review systems. By combining the heuristic-systematic model with text analysis techniques, we propose three review navigation aids that incorporate extracted tags of peripheral cues, elaborateness cues (central cues), and product and service attributes (central cues). The effects of the three navigation aids against a control condition on review browsing behaviors, perceptions, and purchase intentions were examined through a laboratory experiment on a simulated e-commerce website with 160 participants. The results showed that the participants were more satisfied with the peripheral-cue-based aid for both types of products. Participants using the peripheral-cue-based aid made the most use of its unique tags, and spent a larger proportion of time reading reviews under these unique tags, as compared to those using central-cue-based aids. Furthermore, the impact of user experience with review navigation aids on purchase intentions was significant only for experience products and not for search products. These findings help designers of review systems understand the selective processing behaviors of online reviews and improve their design by utilizing peripheral cues as navigation aids.