Social product discovery is an emerging paradigm that enables users to seek information and inspiration from peer-contributed contents. Researchers have observed herd behaviors in social discovery, i.e., basing beliefs and decisions on what similarly situated others have done. In this paper, we explore the effects of content layout and motivation on users' herd behaviors in social discovery. We conduct an eye-tracking study with 120 participants to compare goal- and action-oriented users' behaviors on a grid versus waterfall style social discovery site. The results show that users have a higher tendency to herd on a grid-style website, more so for goal-oriented users.

Collaborative online shopping, an emerging paradigm in e-commerce, allows remote shoppers to extend purchase-oriented social interactions into the digital environment. Online vendors have been experimenting ways to facilitate this activity. However, more research needs to be done on identifying what feature can create a pleasing shopping experience and ultimately encourage spending. In this paper, we present an exploration of the impact of co-navigation supports, including location cue, split screen, and shared view, on the experiences and performance of 60 co-shopper dyads. We also studied if status composition of shopping companions played a role in this process. By analyzing about 1800 minutes of eye-tracking data, video footages, and web logs, we found that split screen encouraged more diverse product search, shared view enabled better coordination, and location cue was the least distracting. Co-buyers achieved better factual and inference understanding, though buyer-advisor dyads were more likely to stay together.

Volunteering is an important activity that brings great benefits to societies. However, encouraging volunteerism is difficult due to the altruistic nature of volunteer activities and the high resource demand in carrying them out. We have created a Facebook game called "Farmer's Tale" to attract and make it easier for people to volunteer. We evaluated people's acceptance to this novel idea and the results revealed great potential in such type of games.

This paper reports on two studies that investigate the design of online product interactivity. The first study compares three different presentation formats: a video presentation and two Virtual Product Experience (VPE) presentations, namely, triggered interaction and full interaction. The findings suggest that triggered interaction VPE is more effective in enticing users to attend to and further explore the featured products than both the non-interactive video presentation and the full interaction VPE. The second study builds upon the first and focuses on two specific VPE design factors. In particular, it investigates interaction constraint (high versus low constraint) in addition to the activation mode of interaction (process-based interaction versus event-based interaction). The results reveal interesting interaction patterns between the two design factors, i.e., providing less constrained interaction performs better when process-based interaction design is adopted, but performs worse when event-based interaction is employed.