Touch or click? The effect of direct and indirect human-computer interaction on consumer responses

ABSTRACT

This paper examines how input devices of human-computer interaction (HCI) affect consumers’ attitudes and purchase intentions. Across four studies (one study with two secondary data and three experiments), we demonstrate that consumers using direct HCI (touch with fingers) will generate more favorable attitudes and greater purchase intentions than those using indirect HCI (click with a mouse). This effect is mediated by the sense of immersion and moderated by the product haptic importance. Specifically, the sense of immersion significantly mediates the effect of input devices on consumers’ attitudes and purchase intentions for high haptic products. In contrast, the mediating effect of the sense of immersion becomes weaker for low haptic products. These findings make important theoretical contributions to the HCI and touch literature. We also provide some practical implications for firms to improve product evaluations and purchase behavior through human-computer interaction.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

¹ According to our definition, voice (e.g. Siri or Amazon’s Alexa) is considered as direct HCI. In virtual reality, hand gloves and other hand input devices or 3D headsets (e.g. Oculus) are considered to be indirect HCI. In this paper, we only focus on touch with the fingers (direct HCI) and clicking with a mouse (indirect HCI).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grant [72002225, 71672203]; Ministry of Education of the People Republic of China, Humanities, Social Science Foundation [22YJA630124]; the Natural Science Foundation of Guangdong Province under Grant [2021A1515011899]; and the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities under Grant [20wkpy12].