Where in an app or a checkout do people decide to stay or leave?
Every session reads as a four-phase story, and the alignment phase, when people decide, is where clarity, lower risk, and signs of fit matter most, because a person who leaves there rarely comes back.
Hypotheses.
What the paper argues, written so it can be tested.
- H1
On a decision page, putting the total cost, the key terms, and a specific way out in the same view as the main button lowers abandonment more than adding persuasion earlier in the session.
- H2
People who leave during the alignment phase come back to finish less often than people who leave in any other phase, so changes there move completion rates the most.
The model.
A session told as a four-phase story. The hook gets attention, exploration narrows the options, alignment weighs fit against risk, and resolution carries out the choice. Leaving at alignment is the hardest exit to undo: people who walk away there rarely come back.
Partial abstract.
Sessions in e-commerce, onboarding, and conversational agents are modeled as a four-phase narrative arc. The paper proposes that the alignment phase, where a person weighs fit and risk, matters most, since drop-off there is the least reversible.
The Four-Phase User Experience Narrative and the Decisive Role of Alignment in HCI Sessions
Key sources
- Fogg, B. J. (2003). Persuasive technology: Using computers to change what we think and do.
- Deck, C. A., and Jahedi, S. (2015). The effect of cognitive load on economic decision making: A survey and new experiments.
- Long, X., et al. (2024). The choice overload effect in online recommender systems.
How we’ll test it.
No results yet. This is the plan: the data, the measure, and what would count as support.
The data
Session logs from online checkouts and software sign-ups, tagged by phase, with versions of the decision page that change what sits next to the main button.
The measure
Drop-off in each phase, how often people who left come back to finish, and completion rates for each version of the decision page.
What would count as support
People who leave at alignment come back least often, and the page with costs, terms, and guarantees in view cuts drop-off there more than any change to another phase.
How it connects to Pulp.
Loosethreads cues meet people at the moment they decide.
Also in Interaction
- Does Nvidia speak differently to engineers than to everyone else?
R.H., Stony Brook University
Doing work like this?
Students from any school or field, and mentors from academia or industry: get in touch.