A study on the configurational effects of multidimensional attributes on the continuance intentions of Chinese smart home app users

Smart home apps are an important interface through which users manage devices and configure services. Users’ continuance intention may be associated with different combinations of experiential attributes. This study used a mixed-methods approach combining online review mining, PLS-SEM, and fsQCA. We extracted eight experiential attributes from 3,667 reviews and examined their relationships with user satisfaction and continuance intention using 553 survey responses. PLS-SEM showed that system operational stability ( β = 0.192) and smart scenario and service automation ( β = 0.183) were significantly positively associated with satisfaction, whereas the paths from visual aesthetics and interaction simplicity and from voice and multimodal interaction to satisfaction were not statistically significant. Satisfaction was significantly positively associated with continuance intention ( β = 0.775). The R ² values for satisfaction and continuance intention were 0.807 and 0.687, respectively. fsQCA identified 13 configurations associated with high continuance intention and grouped them into three patterns. All five pathways in Pattern 1 included the absence of commercial information intrusion (~ CII); the pathways in Pattern 2 did not specify whether CII was present or absent; and those in Pattern 3 included its presence. The necessity analysis identified no single necessary condition. These findings show that different combinations of attributes can be associated with high continuance intention, providing configurational evidence for understanding smart home app users’ continuance intention and informing differentiated design.