Understanding the effects of textual representational alignment on user search and stopping behavior

User reviews have become a standard source of textual information that can be accessed during an information search. Prior research has identified several content-related attributes of user reviews (review length, extremeness, etc.) that make user reviews helpful to users; however, this research has neglected how this information is consumed by the user. Psychological research has suggested that different textual representations (narrative or expository) are consumed differently by users based on the users’ domain knowledge. In the present research, an experiment was conducted to examine how a user’s search pattern (breadth-of-search and depth-of-search) and his information search termination pattern are affected by different alignments between the textual representations (narrative and expository) and the user’s domain knowledge. A search product (digital cameras) and an experience product (music compact disk) were tested. Findings suggest that if a user’s domain knowledge is aligned correctly with a textual representation (High Domain Knowledge/Expository or Low Domain Knowledge/Narrative) he will have a deeper and broader search than a user who is misaligned (High Domain Knowledge/Narrative or Low Domain Knowledge/Expository). Limitations and areas for future research are discussed.