To switch or not? Effects of spokes-character urgency during the social app loading process and app type on user switching intention

Users of mobile phone applications (apps) often have to wait for the pages of apps to load, a process that substantially affects user experience. Based on the Attentional Gate Model and Emotional Contagion Theory, this paper explores the effects of the urgency expressed by a spokes-character’s movement in the loading page of a social app the app type on users’ switching intention through two studies. In Study 1 (N = 173), the results demonstrated that for a hedonic-orientated app, a high-urgency (vs. low-urgency) spokes-character resulted in a lower switching intention, whereas the opposite occurred for a utilitarian-orientated app. We adopted a similar methodology in Study 2 (N = 182) and the results showed that perceived waiting time mediated the interaction effect demonstrated in Study 1. Specifically, for the hedonic-orientated (vs. utilitarian-orientated) social app, the high-urgency (vs. low-urgency) spokes-character made participants estimate a shorter perceived waiting time, which induces a lower user switching intention. This paper contributes to the literature on emotion, spokes-characters, and human–computer interaction, which extends an enhanced understanding of users’ perception during loading process and informs the design of spokes-characters for the loading pages of apps.