Moderating influences on interactivity effects

Research on website interactivity is widespread and there are two important reasons for this popularity. The first is that interactivity is assumed to be the key characteristic that distinguishes communication in traditional media from communication in new media such as websites (Chung and Zhao, 2004; Jo and Kim, 2003). The second reason for the great interest in website interactivity is the generally positive influence of website interactivity on affective consumer responses to websites. While there is also some discussion on the possible detrimental or inverted u-shaped influence of interactivity on information processing (Liu and Shrum, 2002), a bulk of studies have shown that interactive websites are more positively evaluated and this positive website evaluation generally spills over to positive evaluations of the content that is presented in this website.