Adapting Human-Computer-Interaction of Attentive Smart Glasses to the Trade-Off Conflict in Purchase Decisions: An Experiment in a Virtual Supermarket

In many everyday purchase decisions, consumers have to trade-off their decisions between alternatives. For example, consumers often have to decide whether to buy the more expensive high quality product or the less expensive product of lower quality. Marketing researchers are especially interested in finding out how consumers make decisions when facing such trade-off conflicts and eye-tracking has been used as a tool to investigate the allocation of attention in such situations. Conflicting decision situations are also particularly interesting for human-computer interaction research because designers may use knowledge about the information acquisition behavior to build assistance systems which can help the user to solve the trade-off conflict. In this paper, we build and test such an assistance system that monitors the user’s information acquisition processes using mobile eye-tracking in the virtual reality. In particular, we test whether and how strongly the trade-off conflict influences how consumers direct their attention to products and features. We find that trade-off conflict, task experience and task involvement significantly influence how much attention products receive. We discuss how this knowledge might be used in the future to build assistance systems in the form of attentive smart glasses.