Research, Books, and Honors

Netcentric Behavioral Lab

The Netcentric Behavioral Laboratory is one of the resources available to researchers who are affiliated with the Center for Excellence in Service. This lab is designed to allow researchers to conduct experimental research on human behavior, and provides new information technology resources for computer-aided experiments, as well as traditional resources.

Recent Research Conducted by CES Faculty:

Smith PhD student Debora Thompson and Center for Excellence in Service faculty Rebecca Hamilton and Roland Rust recently conducted a series of studies using the Netcentric Behavioral Laboratory. The topic of their research was "feature fatigue:" consumers' tendency to choose overly complex products that do not maximize their satisfaction when using them.

To study the feature fatigue effect, they had Smith School students use several different models of virtual digital video players on the computers in the lab. The students performed a series of tasks with the players, such as opening movie files, playing movies, and recording parts of a movie. The lab's software recorded students' clickstreams as they performed these tasks, providing an objective measure of the product's usability. Participants also rated the capability and usability of each player and their overall satisfaction with each player.

The results of the studies showed that although consumers recognize that product usability decreases as more features are added to products, they do not give sufficient weight to usability until they use the product. Because consumers give more weight to capability and less weight to usability before relative to after use, consumers tend to choose products with too many features. Thus, although a majority of the participants chose the model with the largest number of features before using one of the players, participants who used the high-feature model before choosing a player were significantly less likely to choose this model, even though they had already invested time learning to use it.

Having access to the Netcentric Behavioral Laboratory was critical to the success of this project. Being able to actually use the products was a key part of the study's design because participants could not imagine how their product preferences would change after using the product; they had to actually use the product for the "feature fatigue" effect to occur.

For more information about Thompson, Hamilton and Rust's research on feature fatigue, see the Spring 2005 issue of SMITHBusiness Magazine. Their research paper, "Feature Fatigue: When Product Capabilities Become Too Much of a Good Thing," will be published in the Journal of Marketing Research. Thompson's dissertation proposal based on this work won the Marketing Science Institute's 2004 Alden G. Clayton Doctoral Dissertation Proposal Competition.

For more information visit the Netcentric Behavioral Laboratory.