Designing The Next Generation Marketplace PDF Download

Virtual reality (VR) is predicted to be one of the next big retail trends that can transform the online shopping experience. Despite the surge of interest, important questions remain unanswered: how would VR change the current consumer online shopping behavior? If VR indeed has an impact on consumer behavior, what are the key explanatory factors for such an impact? For a novel interface such as VR, how do we effectively design a virtual market place that is easy to use? This dissertation explores these three questions in a series of three studies. In Study 1, I compare a website to a VR store and examine how consumer behavior varies when they use a website and a VR interface. The results of Study 1 indicate that VR can be an effective shopping means especially for visually appealing hedonic products, thereby increasing the chance of exploring a hedonically superior product over a utilitarian product. In Study 2, I investigate the mechanism underlying consumers' preference for hedonic items and purchase intention with a VR store. The results of Study 2 reveal the distinctive roles of informativeness and playfulness of a VR store in predicting a product choice and subsequent purchase intention. In the last study, I explore how to design 3D user interactions that are easy to learn and use so that consumers can have a more informative and playful VR shopping experience. I developed three different prototypes and conducted a series of user studies to evaluate each interaction design. This dissertation makes a number of theoretical and practical contributions to the broad academic fields ranging from design, marketing to human-computer interaction (HCI). Theoretically, this dissertation contributes to understanding the distinctive roles of informativeness and playfulness, two popular constructs studied in marketing and HCI research. From a practical point of view, this research finding is especially meaningful for online retailers who sell large-scale luxury or designer goods, one of the toughest product segments to sell online. The findings of this dissertation suggest that VR can help consumers to better appreciate the stylish and luxurious appeal of products by allowing shoppers to more directly experience the life-size products. Moreover, this dissertation takes a further step toward designing 3D user interactions that can help consumers to easily navigate and manipulate the product in a virtual environment. I conclude this dissertation by presenting design guidelines that can aid more natural and intuitive interaction with a virtual product. The findings from this study, all combined together, provide insights for designers to understand how to create an effective virtual reality marketplace.