Application discoverability and user satisfaction in mobile application stores: An environmental psychology perspective

In order to appeal to consumers, mobile application stores face the challenge of finding ways to achieve the seemingly conflicting goals of providing a large quantity of applications and simultaneously making the specific applications that users desire easy to discover. Drawing on environmental psychology, this paper reports a study investigating how quantity-related facilitators and environment-related facilitators are related to application discoverability, which in turn impacts user satisfaction with the application store. We find that quantity-related facilitators (perceived quantity-sufficiency, perceived quantity-overload, and information specificity of search) and environment-related facilitators (application store coherence and user-generated reviews) all influence application discoverability, which affects user satisfaction. These facilitators play a role in managing the conflicting goals in mobile application stores.

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