Process Blog and Notes on Reviews (11/3-9)

Heuristic Evaluation Exercise

http://mhcid2014fall2ndprojectgjy.blogspot.com/2014/11/heuristic-evaluation-114-5.html

We narrowed down our concept to "search what people like me like". To refine our concept, we decided to do a little more research on reviews and explore our concept by sketching it out. The following is Chris' research note on reviews. We will meet on Monday to have consolidate our concept and prepare for Thursday's presentation.

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1567422312000464

• “word of mouth” reviews are critical for “service-based” products (like finding a doctor) because there is no way to test the service before you purchase.

• consumers associate this type of good as higher risk and uncertainty, therefore they put more weight on the information they can gather

• “when perceived risk is very high, consumers use word-of-mouth as their primary risk-coping strategy”.

• finding a doctor is considered a “credence service” and is considered the highest risk of all types of service goods because there is a high level of uncertainty.

• “[because of a greater level of uncertainty], consumers evaluating credence services are more likely to place greater emphasis on specific aspects of reviews”

• reviewer’s “reputation” is correlated with the perceived usefulness of a given review

• There is lots of uncertainty about the authenticity of reviews because of promotional incentives, don't trust motives of other reviewers

• “consumers must handle the uncertainty regarding the integrity and intentions of the people who write the reviews”

• peer ranking reviews as “most helpful” has been shown to be a good way to help with this. Unclear whether this method is relevant for healthcare implementations

• but it does provide motivation for the reviewer to provide a high quality review. Recognition is a very strong motivator.

• “experience and credence services are subject to variation in individual tastes and are therefore subjective in nature. Consumers are often highly confident about their own tastes and subjective evaluations but skeptical about the views of others”.

• “therefore, advice and comments from experienced customers helps review readers experience the service offering vicariously”.

• “perceived similarity between the message source and recipient is extremely important when evaluating credence services”

• “personal identification of the source based on information such as gender and geographical origin considerably enhances the credibility of the message”

• disclosing reviewer identity helps with credibility

• another study found this helps boost sales

• some studies have found that those who are shown to have more experience (or expertise) with a product or service gives their review more credibility

• but the study citing this found contradicting evidence...

• Some studies have found that consumers pay more attention to the textual portion of reviews than the star rating.

• the number of reviews associated with a product/service is often used as a heuristic to assess the general quality of the good.

• this should be incentive for Premera to generate more reviews

• Consumers trust peer reviews over “expert” reviews for experiential products.

• negative reviews are considered more helpful.

• important to show negative reviews

• Previous literature indicates that “consumers sometimes pick only reviews written by reviewers who, the consumers feel, are genuine and have similar social backgrounds, tastes and preferences. As a result, some reviews have greater influence on consumers than others”.

• although the main study citing this finding resulted in a different finding…