How to Design Interfaces for Product Recommendation Agents to Influence the Purchase of Environmentally-Friendly Products

摘要

This study focuses on how to design the interfaces of a product recommendation agent (PRA) that would influence its users to purchase products that are beneficial for the environment. In particular, we discuss how to design various affect cues in a PRA interface to change customers' preference levels on key environmentally related product attributes, and thus influence their final product choice. Based on the theory of affect heuristics and the General Evaluability Theory, we design three types of affective cues with different levels of evaluability. The findings of an experiment conducted to assess the impact of these designs indicate that affective cues with high and medium levels of evaluability induced participants to prefer products of higher "greenness" levels.