Application discoverability and user satisfaction in mobile application stores: An environmental psychology perspective

• Study draws on environmental psychology to explain application store user satisfaction.
• Our survey finds that user satisfaction is influenced by store discoverability.
• Discoverability facilitators are related to quantity of applications and the environment.
• Perceived quantity of applications has two dimensions: sufficiency (+) and overload (−).
• Environmental facilitators differed slightly between the U.S. and South Korea samples.

In order to appeal to consumers, mobile application stores face the challenge of finding ways to achieve the seemingly conflicting goals of providing a large quantity of applications and simultaneously making the specific applications that users desire easy to discover. Drawing on environmental psychology, this paper reports a study investigating how quantity-related facilitators and environment-related facilitators are related to application discoverability, which in turn impacts user satisfaction with the application store. We find that quantity-related facilitators (perceived quantity-sufficiency, perceived quantity-overload, and information specificity of search) and environment-related facilitators (application store coherence and user-generated reviews) all influence application discoverability, which affects user satisfaction. These facilitators play a role in managing the conflicting goals in mobile application stores.