Page 160 - 33-3

Understanding People's Switching Intentions of Health Apps from Exterior and Interior Drivers

lead to users' switching behavior, then it is necessary to further understand the process of
generating online reviews. This is because, at present, scholars do not have a consistent
understanding of the construction of social influence. Although we know the importance
of social influence, we still need to clarify the connotation of social influence in order to

build a more robust model.
Fourth, most of the technology analyzed in past studies are personal IT products
and services, such as web browsers (Bhattacherjee et al., 2012), smartphones (Fan and

Suh, 2014), online games (Hou et al., 2011), and instant messengers (Sun et al., 2017).
Although these technology products can represent the status of personal use of technology,
the results of these studies cannot fully explain the reasons for switching health apps
(Vaghefi and Tulu, 2019; Xiong and Zuo, 2023); particularly, health apps record sensitive
information of users. Meanwhile, we prove that whether a person continues to use a

health app is related to whether others continue to use the app. Thus, addressing the usage
differences between health apps and other personal IT, and to identify the factors that
affect switching intentions of health apps is another contributions of this research.

6.2 Practical Implications
Switching of a health app means that the user loses interest in the app, which also
means that the development cost invested by the app company is wasted. Therefore,
reducing the user’s switching intention is a way for companies to keep profits. For these

purposes, this study provides several practical recommendations for app designers,
companies, and executives.
First, to increase the extent of social influence, app providers should figure out some

ways to enhance users’ loyalty for avoiding switching intention. For instance, they may
adopt some viral approaches, such as Podcast or Clubhouse, to talk about the healthcare
and medical topics and promote their own apps simultaneously. As a result, the users are
more likely to be held in the online community and less likely to consider switching to
other health apps.

Second, satisfaction affects the willingness to switch health apps. Therefore,
application companies should think about how to reduce customer dissatisfaction so that
users do not switch away from their existing health apps. Application companies must

also understand why customers are dissatisfied with existing applications and improve the

152