The Effect of Distractions on Online Consumer Satsifaction

The prevailing wisdom in web design literature cautions against the use of distracting website features; such as animated banners, pop-ups and floating advertisements, as they have the potential to cause annoyance and disrupt the process of pre-purchase evaluation in the context of online shopping. Recent advances in the field of cognitive psychology however, have suggested that a systematic and conscious process of evaluation prior to making a purchase may not always be ideal. In particular, the deliberation-without-attention hypothesis of the theory of unconscious thought postulates that the quality of conscious decision making deteriorates as decision complexity increases such that for complex decisions, unconscious thought will outperform conscious thought. If the hypothesis holds true in the context of online shopping for complex products, and if the positive effect of better decision quality that results from the use of distracting website features can overcome the negative effect of annoyance on customer satisfaction, then much of what we assume or think we know about website design is invalidated. The enormity of the theoretical and practical implications of such a notion forms the motivation for this research-in-progress article, and an experiment is proposed to test the deliberation-without-attention hypothesis in the context of online shopping.