Application discoverability on multipurpose public displays: popularity comes at a price

An important step in developing multipurpose public displays is understanding application discoverability: the effort required to locate or "discover" an application amongst others. Discoverability can affect the adoption and potential success applications. Here we investigate the effects of application discoverability on two aspects of application use: relative utility and conversion rate. We do so by testing three conditions that provide incremental discoverability to an application. Our results indicate that increased discoverability leads to higher relative utility but lower conversion rates. We discuss the implications our findings have on evaluating applications on multipurpose displays, and finally we show how our results contribute to understanding the economics of discoverability mechanisms.