Websites today are increasingly interactive affairs, with a range of tools designed to facilitate communication between users.  These tools, which are known as computer-mediated communication (CMC), are not used universally by all users, however.

For instance, research from Penn State shows that male extroverts consider sites to be more interactive when sites allowed them to interact with the computer, which the researchers refer to as human-computer interaction (HCI).

“When you go to a website—for example, the Google search engine—you’re essentially engaging in HCI, which is different from CMC, which is when you’re communicating with other humans through computer technology,” the researchers say. “When we talk about HCI here, it’s really about the degree to which the system or the machine allows us to interact with it, and it includes everything from how we swipe and tap on our mobile devices, to how we try to access different information through links on a website. When we talk about CMC, it is about the tools to chat with somebody else, like a customer service agent through an online portal, or when we’re having a video chat via zoom, for example.”

Monitoring behavior

The researchers examined how users respond to various online tools via four experiments in which participants were exposed to one of four conditions while browsing a news website.  The conditions meant that they were either using a website with tools that allowed them to communicate with either humans or the website.

Participants were instructed to browse the site as if they were going to choose a movie, before then answering a number of questions about their experience and their personality.

The study found that many of the behaviors we exhibit online are influenced by our behaviors and habits in real life.  This explains why people who are extroverted offline continue such behaviors when they venture online.

“Our findings largely supported the hypothesis that as people’s level of extroversion goes up, they’re more likely to recognize the interactive potential of the site, no matter if it’s communicating with the machine, or using the computer to talk to other people, but gender also made a difference here,” the researchers say. “What we saw was that extroversion has slightly different effects for men compared to women, in terms of the types of interactivity that they appreciate more.”

User experience

The authors argue that by better understanding who users are and what engages them it becomes feasible to craft better user experiences.  If developers know the kind of interactivity people want then it’s easier to provide that.  For instance, the researchers argue that if an e-commerce site is tailored towards women, it would be well served to provide more chat tools that allow users to interact with each other.

This unsurprisingly helped to shape attitudes about each website and whether users found them appealing or interesting.  Given the constantly changing nature of digital communication, the researchers believe this is an important area that warrants ongoing investigation to understand how tools influence user behavior.

“In this study, we only operationalized one function for CMC, which was the comment function and one function for HCI in the form of layered hyperlinks,” the researchers say. “It would be interesting to test whether the findings actually hold true for newer interactive features, such as those found in augmented reality or AI chatbot applications.”