Triggered essential reviewing: the effect of technology affordances on service experience evaluations

This paper responds to the recent call for understanding the nature and consequences of the digital mediation of everyday experiences. We do so in the context of online opinion sharing. We propose that the unique design features of mobile computing devices and the intention and purpose of their users, meld into a technology affordance we label: Triggered essential reviewing. We empirically investigate the effect of this technology affordance on opinion characteristics (i.e., timing and length), and outcomes (i.e., opinion valence and content). We find that triggered essential reviewing engenders opinions that cover a narrower range of aspects of the experience and that it produces a negative evaluative bias—a bias that mitigates over time. Our work makes two contributions to the application of affordance theory in Information Systems. First, it shows the importance of IT design in studying experiential computing. While not taking a deterministic view of technology, we validate the notion that different technology designs produce a variation of effects around a predictable central tendency. Second, it empirically demonstrates that the affordances of embodied digital experiences have an effect on actual behavior as well as on the outcome of the experience itself.