What Happens When You Click and Drag: Unpacking the Relationship between On-Screen Interaction and User Engagement with an Anti-Smoking Website

Interactive media provide a physically active experience for users to click, slide, mouseover, and zoom-in/out, but how this increased amount of on-screen interaction is associated with cognitive and attitudinal outcomes has remained unexplored. We tackled this issue by conducting an online study where we recorded the amount of on-screen interaction on a targeted interactive feature, sliders, and correlated it with user engagement, attitudes toward anti-smoking messages, and smoking outcome beliefs, while controlling their baseline smoking outcome beliefs (N = 149). We found that the number of clicks and drags on sliders was positively associated with their attitudes toward anti-smoking messages and smoking outcome belief, but only among nonsmokers who are power users of technology. An increase in perceptual bandwidth influenced by interacting with the slider was significantly correlated with greater user engagement among these users. In contrast, for smokers who are not power users, greater on-screen interaction showed a negative correlation with their user engagement mediated by an increase in defensive processing.