On the Same Page? What Users Benefit from a Desktop View on Mobile Devices

The presentation of online content is routinely adapted to the smaller screens of mobile devices by implementing an information architecture (IA) that hierarchically restructures the information being presented to users, in conjunction with layout and size adaptations. Despite the understanding that users of mobile devices are likely to experience lower usability and higher load without such adaptations, a recent trend is to offer these users the ability to opt out of content adaptation and revert to a desktop view. The prevailing justification for this trend is the existence of websites that fail to provide an optimal mobile experience. In this work, we show that a desktop view may benefit mobile users by increasing the accuracy of their decisions. Focusing on the difference between a desktop IA, where information is presented on a single page, and a mobile IA, where information is hierarchically distributed across pages, we hypothesize that mobile users exhibit lower decision accuracy when a mobile IA is implemented. We theoretically anchor this hypothesis in the effort-accuracy framework, which views decision behavior as contingent on the trade-off between effort and accuracy. This hypothesis is supported in two laboratory experiments in which participants are faced with the multiattribute choice task of making an online hotel reservation. The experiments also highlight a boundary condition for the negative effect of the mobile IA on decision accuracy, depending on whether the mobile IA is congruent with user preferences. The findings suggest that content adaptation on mobile devices deserves greater research attention, particularly from the perspective of adaptive decision behavior.