UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — With countless mobile apps available to every-day consumers — from breaking news and social media to gaming and e-books — content producers of reading apps continue to face the challenge of engaging and retaining their users. Faster loading times and incentives like free book chapters and credits may make an e-reader the “one app to rule them all,” or at least keep users reading, according to new research from Penn State.

A new study examines the impact of content loading time and previous reading behavior on consumers' engagement and content consumption on an e-books mobile app. The paper, titled “Understanding of the dynamics of mobile reading: An HMM model of user engagement and content consumption,” was developed to help app designers and content providers to engage with digital readers by understanding their engagement patterns and consumption decisions.

Lei Wang, assistant professor of information systems in the Penn State Smeal College of Business, said understanding consumers’ engagement and subsequent content consumption behavior in the mobile context is critical to the success of mobile app providers.

Wang noted that the number of mobile users in the United States in 2021 reached almost 300 million and that the average person spends more than five hours daily on a mobile device. Additionally, the online book market continues to widen and is projected to reach nearly $25 billion by 2026, up from $19 billion in 2021.

“We are among the first to empirically examine how the delay, as an operational factor, drives user mobile content consumption behavior,” Wang said. “Apps are designed for various purposes, such as fast news sharing, connecting with friends, and watching short videos. Each app appeals to consumers in different dimensions. In this research, we focused on an e-reading app that facilitates consumers’ reading on their smartphones in their fragmented spare time, such as waiting for the train, taking a bus or having a lunch break.”

Wang’s research leveraged a Hidden Markov Model to estimate how a consumer interacts with an app and how his or her level of interest and interactions changes over time. The model allowed the researchers to study “hidden” variables — in this case, how users interacted with an app over time and what factors influenced their decisions — by focusing on variables they could measure. Specifically, they examined the number of books and chapters users read and the amount of money spent on digital books.

The study showed that faster loading times and incentives for users to take shorter reading breaks may help to engage users and increase app revenues. 

‘When you open an e-book on your phone or tablet, it takes time to load the content and that delay is something consumers must endure,” Wang said. “Multiple factors may contribute to this delay, such as where and how data is stored. App producers can manage some operational and technical factors such as improving server processing and adopting more efficient data compression methods to reduce content loading time.”

A reading break, Wang explained, is the time that has elapsed since a consumer’s last reading activity.

“This delay is imposed by consumers, but app developers can use marketing strategies and offer incentives to shorten it,” she said. “For example, once a user stops reading books for an extended period of time, app developers can send free books chapters, push notifications, and provide free credits on the app to reactivate these users and motivate them back on the app to consume more digital books. ”

The research also revealed three latent engagement states of readers: low, or inactive; medium, with users sampling books; and high, with users reading intensively.

“We found that the more engaged a user is with a platform, then delay on the app has a higher negative impact. A highly engaged user is less tolerant of slower loading times; less engaged users are more tolerant in terms of waiting for the content to load,” Wang said. “Similarly, a longer reading break could lead to users sliding down from the high engaged state and to stop reading completely. Users with more frequent reading activity are more likely to stay engaged with the app.”

Wang said when consumers use an app or website, the app designers need to find out if consumers are really interested, bored or even frustrated while using it. They also need to find out how consumers’ interests change over time.

“If content providers can figure out how engaged consumers are and what factors affect their interactions with the app, they can make their services more appealing to consumers,” she said.

Other contributors to the research include Lu Huang, assistant clinical professor of supply chain and information at Penn State Smeal, as well as University of Georgia professors Xia Zhao and Elham Yazdani, and Fudan University (Shanghai, China) professor Cheng Zhang.

The research received financial support from the Terry-Sanford Awards and the National Science Foundation of China.