he research employed a 2 (high/low text clarity) × 2 (high/low background to text contrast) × 2 (high/low information intensity) between-subjects experimental design. In the real world, large consumer electronics retailers (e.g., Best Buy, Office Depot) allow online consumers to compare at least four alternatives per page. To maintain this realism, the participants compared five products across two pages of product information. The font size and space used for the presentation of product information were kept the same across all treatments. For text clarity, the product information appeared in Arial and Mistral fonts, based on successful previous manipulations (Song & Schwarz, 2008). For background contrast, successful pre-tests using 74 students across four treatments suggested employing white versus a gray background against black text, following the aesthetic principles of figure–ground contrast (Reber et al., 2004).
The experiment manipulated information intensity by varying the number of attributes (5 and 15) presented per alternative. These thresholds were based on the significant differences detected in a previous study (Mosteller & Donthu, 2010).