Designing Interfaces with Social Presence: Using Vividness and Extraversion to Create Social Recommendation Agents

Abstract

Interfaces now employ a variety of media-rich, social, and advanced decision-making components, including recommendation agents (RA) designed to assist users with their tasks. Social presence has been identified as a key consideration in website design to overcome the lack of warmth, social cues, and face-to-face interaction, but few studies have investigated the interface features that may increase social presence. Recent research on RAs has similarly acknowledged social presence as a key factor in the design of online RAs and in building trust in this technology, but there has been limited empirical work on the topic. In this study an experiment was conducted to explore how social technology cues, media capabilities, and individual differences influence social presence and trust in an RA. RA personality (extraversion), vividness (text, voice, and animation), and computer playfulness were found to influence social presence, with social presence serving in a mediating role and increasing user trust in the RA. Vividness also had a moderating effect on the relationship between RA extraversion and social presence such that increased levels of vividness strengthen this relationship.

Social presence, trust, and social commerce purchase intention: An empirical research

“…This study adopts the conceptualization of trust as a set of specific beliefs including integrity, benevolence and ability (McKnight et al 2002). This conceptualization of trust is akin to that of other studies adopting SPT (Gefen & Staub 2004;Hess et al 2009). Then trusting beliefs is conceptualized as a second-order construct in this study.…”

Social commerce—state-of-the-art and future research directions

“…Several articles in this research stream explore how to motivate, enhance, and support the interaction of consumers by applying collaborative shopping technologies (e.g., virtual advisors, avatars, social recommender systems), which support navigation and communication and impact consumers' shopping value (e.g., Arazy et al 2010;Gottschlich et al 2013;Hess et al 2009;Li and Buchthal 2012;Seedorf et al 2014;Shi et al 2013;Wang et al 2007;Yue and Jiang 2013;Zhu et al 2010). For instance, Seedorf et al (2014) explore social co-browsing for shoppers, a relatively recent social technology for collaborative online shopping, and how this technology impacts user engagement.…”

Social Influence from Personalized Recommendations to Trusting Beliefs of Websites: Intermediate Role of Social Presence

“…Through previous studies, it is not difficult to conclude that the perception of social presence is a key intervening variable in the process of users reading through the web interface elements to affect the user trust [3,4]. In this study, further test is made to see whether user's perception of social presence will mediate the influence of perceived personalization on trusting beliefs towards the website.…”

“…All the measuring scales were previously validated, including scale for Trusting beliefs [4,9], scale for perceived personalization [10], and scale for social presence [3] and measuring for demographical profiles. Each participant would get a reward of 10 RMB and some candies.…”

“…This is the foundation for the forming of the perception of social presence. Many investigations show that social presence is a key factor influencing the consumer trust towards the website [3,4]. Previous studies, however, rarely discuss how it is affected by personalized recommendations.…”