Online Terms and Conditions: Improving User Engagement, Awareness, and Satisfaction through UI Design

Too often, while interacting with online technologies, we blindly agree to services’ terms and conditions (T&Cs). We often disregard their content—believing it is not worth engaging with the long, hard-to-understand texts. The inconspicuous display of online T&Cs on the user interface (UI) adds to our lack of engagement. Nevertheless, certain information included in T&Cs could help us make optimal decisions. In this replication research, we investigate this issue in the purchasing context. We confirm and extend previous findings through an online experiment (N = 987), showing that differently presented T&Cs (icons, scroll, and cost-cue) compared to hyperlinked text affect whether people open them, becoming aware. We also show the effect of decision-making style on the relationship between awareness and satisfaction. We discuss the possible use of these findings to improve users’ informed decisions. We also highlight problems that different designs may pose, potentially increasing the information gap between users and service providers.