Searching vs. Browsing—The Influence of Consumers’ Goal Directedness on Website Evaluations

Users access the Internet not only to pursue specific goals (e.g. searching for information), but also to browse through content in a more exploratory fashion. The current study experimentally manipulates participants’ tasks in order to investigate how goal-directed (searching) or exploratory (browsing) website activities moderate the impact of key website attributes on users’ overall judgements. A total of 481 participants fulfilled either browsing or searching tasks online and rated the subjective perception of content, aesthetics and usability, as a predictor and overall impression, recommendation and revisit intention as outcome variables. Using path-models, the results show strong and positive relationships between predictor and outcome variables that were moderated by the task. In the browsing condition, both the recommendation and revisit intention were only, but strongly, predicted by content perception. When searching, this relationship was weakened and also related to aesthetics. The impact of perceived usability on the outcomes was not significantly influenced by the task. Therefore, the present study provides evidence against the assumption that certain website facets become more or less important for the evaluation of a website, depending on the user’s goal-directedness. Instead, our findings contradict common assumptions on two accounts: Aesthetics as a hedonic website facet may not only be processed in a bottom-up fashion when browsing and usability as a utilitarian website facet may not mostly be processed top-down when searching.