Software platform ecosystems are emerging as a dominant model for IT-based services. To accelerate third-party development, platform owners often waive restrictions on app user interfaces to provide app developers with more autonomy in interface design. The literature has indicated, however, that standardized interface design across products is a strategic necessity for firms to introduce and manage their product lines, suggesting that platform owners should not waive restrictions on app user interfaces. This tension between the two approaches raises a crucial research question: Does standardized interface design used by apps and their host platform benefit the platform and apps that it hosts? Specifically, does the coordinated design approach enhance or hinder usage between the platform and apps such that apps attract usage from their host platform and vice versa? Drawing on the theory of basic Gestalts, we theorize the three interface design properties of interface similarity, embeddedness, and synchrony, and extend the theory to investigate how these properties help both apps and their host platform attract each other’s users, thus reflecting derivative usage between them. We performed a randomized field experiment to test the proposed hypotheses. The results reveal that interface similarity, embeddedness, and synchrony of the app-platform interface design strengthen users’ grouping perception of the platform and its apps, thus enhancing platform-to-app forward derivative usage. Contrary to our expectations, we found that this strengthened grouping perception does not improve the app-to-platform backward derivative usage. These findings have crucial implications for the value of interface design in software platform ecosystems.

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标准化还是让千花齐放？软件平台和托管应用程序之间的界面设计协调

软件平台生态系统正在成为基于 IT 的服务的主导模式。为了加速第三方开发，平台所有者通常会放弃对应用程序用户界面的限制，为应用程序开发人员提供更多的界面设计自主权。然而，文献表明，跨产品的标准化界面设计是企业引入和管理其产品线的战略必要性，这表明平台所有者不应放弃对应用程序用户界面的限制。两种方法之间的紧张关系提出了一个关键的研究问题：应用程序及其主机平台使用的标准化界面设计是否有利于其托管的平台及其应用程序？具体来说，协调设计方法是否会增强或阻碍平台和应用程序之间的使用，从而使应用程序吸引其主机平台的使用，反之亦然？借鉴基本格式塔理论，我们对界面相似性、嵌入性和同步性这三个界面设计属性进行了理论化，并扩展了该理论来研究这些属性如何帮助应用程序及其宿主平台吸引彼此的用户，从而反映之间的衍生使用他们。我们进行了随机现场实验来检验所提出的假设。结果表明，应用程序平台界面设计的界面相似性、嵌入性和同步性增强了用户对平台及其应用程序的分组感知，从而增强了平台到应用程序的前向衍生使用。与我们的预期相反，我们发现这种强化的分组感知并没有改善应用程序到平台的后向衍生产品的使用。这些发现对于软件平台生态系统中界面设计的价值具有至关重要的影响。