Abstract

One of the most important goals of information systems is to minimize users’ mental effort during decision making. Product sorting is a common way of displaying information for online consumers, which is designed to help them in order to find their desired products more efficiently. Product sorting may help users to make their product decision more conveniently depending on the criteria they have for choosing their product. Our goal in this study was to investigate how different product sorting (i.e., alphabetical, price) may decrease users’ cognitive load during product evaluation phase depending on users’ goal (i.e., product name, price). We expect that a match between goal and sorting type will decrease the amount of mental workload necessary for making a product decision compared to a mismatch condition. A two-factor (Product sorting X Users’ goal) within-subject experiment was designed to test the hypotheses. Contributions to research and implications for practice are discussed.

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