Learning by Doing: Understanding the Role of Affordance Informativity in Information Search Performance

Information search is becoming increasingly demanding due to the booming of Consumer Generated Content (CGC) in online environment. This has led to growing scholarly interest in designing search features to accommodate diverse user preferences. Drawing on the Theory of Affordance Informativity, we advance ostensive informativity and performative informativity as focal mechanisms for search features to convey actions afforded to users. We further put forth a typology of search features that is grounded in both dimensions of search affordance informativities. Next, we construct a research framework that depicts how search affordance informativity bolsters information search performance. By conducting a field experiment on our custom-made online restaurant review website, we discovered that performative informativity increases search result anticipation and reduces search costs whereas ostensive informativity only facilitates the former. Search result anticipation in turn enhances search performance in terms of efficiency and utility, but the opposite effect is observed for search costs.