Shoppers explore on their phones all day. Nobody had measured what drives it.
Every research project starts by turning a vague business curiosity into a question that data can answer. This page shows how I framed mine: why exploration matters, the two forms it takes, what earlier research had left open, and the three questions the study set out to answer.
Why exploration matters commercially
Very few shopping sessions go straight to checkout. People scroll, tap, compare, wander off and come back. Earlier research on online shopping had already concluded that exploration is not a side activity: it is built into every step of the visit, and searching and browsing often happen in the same session, sometimes in the same minute.
Mobile makes this more important, not less. A phone is always within reach, so exploration moves from a desk to the bus, the couch and the queue. For a retailer, that means the app is being explored far more often than it is being bought from. If exploration shapes whether people return, then the features that encourage it are retention features, and teams need to know which ones those are.
Two ways of exploring
Psychology separates exploration into two forms, and the distinction carries over neatly to shopping. They look similar on a screen, but they start from opposite states of mind and aim at opposite outcomes.
Browsing to discover
- Starts from
- Too little stimulation. The shopper is bored or simply curious.
- What they do
- Open themselves to a wide range of products, ideas and suggestions.
- What they want
- More options and something new. Breadth.
- Feels like
- Leisure. The browsing is its own reward.
For example: scrolling a fashion app on the train to see what has come in this week, with nothing particular in mind.
Searching to decide
- Starts from
- Too much uncertainty. The shopper has a question or too many options.
- What they do
- Focus on one product or problem: specifications, reviews, how it works.
- What they want
- Fewer options and a confident answer. Depth.
- Feels like
- A task. The browsing is a means to a decision.
For example: comparing the battery life and reviews of two robot vacuums before choosing one.
The examples are illustrations of mine. The definitions follow Demangeot and Broderick (2010), who first described the two forms in online shopping.
The idea underneath: people explore to feel comfortable
Both forms come from one mechanism. People are most comfortable at a moderate level of stimulation. When there is too little, they look for more. When there is too much, they work to reduce it. The two kinds of exploration are the two ways back to the comfortable middle.
Redrawn and simplified from Berlyne (1960) and Day (1982), as used in Chapter 2 of the thesis.
What earlier research had left open
The two forms had never been measured in shopping.
They had been identified in online shopping through interviews and think-aloud sessions, and the authors had called for survey-based testing. No one had yet built the scales or tested the relationships.
Mobile research was about adoption, not exploration.
Studies of mobile commerce mostly asked why people start using it. What the features of a phone do to exploration once people are using it had received little attention.
The evidence on immersion pointed both ways.
Some studies found that people become immersed mainly during goal-directed tasks. Others found it mainly during leisure browsing. Its role between app features and exploration was unresolved.
The three questions the study answers
- RQ1Which kinds of value in a mobile shopping experience encourage each form of exploration?Usefulness, enjoyment and social value, each tested against browsing to discover and searching to decide.
- RQ2Does immersion carry that influence?Whether value works on exploration directly, or by first drawing the shopper into a state of flow.
- RQ3Which form of exploration leads shoppers to return and recommend?The commercial pay-off: linking the way people browse to their future patronage.