Substitutes and Prompts vs. The Urge to Online Shop 🛍️🥊

The Intervention Opportunity

Our goal was to design an intervention to help “Spencer the Spender” – who wants to follow their budgeting goals but can’t give up the immediate pleasure they derive from online shopping – reduce the frequency of their impulse purchases. 

Intervene before the rabbit hole ✋🕳️

Findings from our baseline study suggested that users in this persona made unplanned purchases after having already invested significant time ⌛ in and accumulated buying desire ❤️‍🔥📈 via digital window shopping. At that point, browsing fatigue and a genuine desire for the products they’ve seen kick in to trigger a purchase. So by the time they’re ready to check out, it’s already too difficult to walk away from the items in their cart. 

This suggested that protecting Spencer from the allure to “window shop” in the first place may be more effective than deterring purchases at checkout when it comes to decreasing the frequency of impulsive purchases. So we developed two investigations for stopping online browsing before it happens:

Could online window shopping be substituted by an alternative activity involving exploration and evaluation of options?

Could introspection prompts reduce people’s urge to window-shop online?

Intervention Designs

Intervention #1: Activity Substitution

We asked 2 out of 5 participants to visit a Notion page with suggestions for three activity substitutes whenever they felt the urge to shop online, updating the substitutes every morning. They always consisted of one internet-based activity, one physical activity, and one social activity. For instance, on a given day they would see a selection like so:

Figure 1 – (From top to bottom) sample of one internet-based activity, one physical activity, and one social activity

Intervention #2: Introspection Prompts

We asked 3 out of 5 participants to answer three introspection prompts whenever they felt the urge to online shop. Our goal was to nudge them into System 2 Thinking by prompting greater self-awareness around (1) what’s driving them to online shop, (2) the impact of their impending actions on their personal goals, and (3) the amount of intentionality in those actions.

Situation: How did I get here? (i.e., what specific process led you to being about to browse?)

Financial Goals: How much have you spent this month? If you buy something after this session, will it set you back from your goals?

Motivation: Is there something in particular I need to buy? If so, describe the desired item and how it will help me in two sentences. If not, please list your reasons for browsing now.

Study Measures

Figure 2 – How we measured the effectiveness of each intervention (this GIF is a hypothetical response)

To quantify the impact of each intervention, we asked all participants to record their urge to online shop on a likert scale BEFORE and AFTER each intervention.

We also asked them to record whether they ended up browsing (for how long?) and why; participants doing the substitution intervention were further asked to elaborate on the alternative activity they embarked on.

What we observed

While analyzing study responses, we noticed that browsing sessions fell into two distinct categories:

• Functional browsing: which was driven by a genuine, functional need (i.e., buying a laptop case to replace a broken one).
• Undirected browsing: which was prompted by some online ad or downtime (users had no target item to buy in mind).

📸 Results Snapshot

Out of the 5 participants, 4 participants entered at least 1 response. Each intervention had 2 participants.

Figure 3 – Effectiveness of substitution and introspection interventions in undirected and functional shopping scenarios

1. 🌡️ Lukewarm success rate: In aggregate, our participants successfully restrained themselves from browsing only 60% of the time (in undirected browsing cases).
2. 📉 Both interventions slightly decreased the urge to begin undirected browsing. However, we only had one data point for an undirected-browsing & introspection context.
3. 🎯 Neither intervention had an effect on the urge to begin functional browsing. Rather, the introspection prompts appear to have reaffirmed the participants’ purpose to buy the target item(s).
4. 💢 Friction of the interventions was enough to deter online browsing: for instance, one participant expressed that “the thought of having to fill out the form just made [her] look for other activities to fill up the time.”
5. 💵 Budget-based reflection was not effective. Asking users to reflect on their monthly budget had no effect on the urge to online shop. Users claimed that a purchase would not set them back financially; however, this could be a biased effect from running the study at the beginning of a month (lack of budgetary pressure).

Synthesis & Insights

Figure 4 –  Raw data mapped onto a timeline

We distilled our raw data (posties in Figure 4) into a system diagram (Figure 5) that steps through participant journeys in both the undirected and functional shopping use cases, documenting the interventions they did and the corresponding outcomes. 

Intervention–Outcome System Diagram

Figure 5 –  Intervention-Outcome System. Line thickness represents # of participants that took the given path; colors delineate distinct participant pathways through the system.

Key insights and new directions✨

1. 💵 Budget-based reflection is easily rationalized-around. In their responses, participants justified browsing intent by claiming they’d only be looking at items of small nominal value, ignoring the possibility of multiple small purchases snowballing into a large bill. This insight opens up some new directions for investigation:
   • Is budget reflection only effective when someone is close to their monthly limit?
   • Could we find more success by displaying projected spend based on current spend velocity? Or by abandoning budgetary reflection altogether?
2. 💻 Easy, time-intensive, and distractive substitutes were more likely to be successful. Participants only successfully substituted online shopping with a suggested alternative 3 out of 8 times – and they were all:
   • easy-to-do (e.g. no going outdoors or device switching)
   • consumed just the “right amount” of downtime (i.e. easy to quit midway or perfectly fills in downtime from browsing so there’s no longer time to online shop afterwards)
   • sufficiently enjoyable to distance participants from their initial urge to browse (i.e. watching Netflix, calling Mom). 
3. 🛣️ Finally, we’ll iterate on our intervention based on a few hypotheses for why other substitutes didn’t work:
   • They didn’t satisfy the urges that drive people to shop online. We’ll need to revisit the basic components of what makes online shopping so enjoyable for Spencer the Spender (i.e. collection compulsion, fulfillment, validation) and test substitutes that also capture those attributes.
   • They didn’t pertain to personal goals / weren’t personalized enough. How might we suggest substitutes that better reflect a user’s needs and goals?
   • They had high barriers to entry. For instance, getting out of bed, doing toiletries, and putting on athletic gear to walk outside is a lot harder to do than listening to a podcast in bed. This doesn’t mean we want to get rid of these types of substitutes – but it does mean we need to ensure there’s a wide variety of activities that are easier to do as well!

Two extra tidbits 🍬

• Browsing sessions motivated by some functional need tend to be very short (2 – 5 min), while browsing sessions that are unplanned tend to be longer (< 30 min).
• Urge to online browse was most commonly triggered by ads in social media apps or gaming environments, so we should consider solution compatibility with media beyond just  e-commerce sites or apps.