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Article published In: Interaction Studies
Vol. 20:2 (2019) ► pp.307–338

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How do technological properties influence user affordance of wearable technologies?

 | Zayed University
Published online: 7 October 2019
DOI logo with link
https://doi.org/10.1075/is.16024.shi
Abstract
The Internet of things (IoT) affords people plenty of opportunities and a higher quality of life as well as drives a huge amount of data. By drawing on the concept of affordances, this study examines the user experience of personal informatics focusing on the technological and affective nature of affordance. A multi-mixed approach is used by combining qualitative methods and a quantitative survey. Results of the qualitative methods revealed a series of factors that related to the affordance of personal informatics, whereas results of the user model confirmed a significant role for connectivity, control, and synchronicity affordance regarding their underlying link to other variables, namely, expectation, confirmation, and satisfaction. The experiments showed that users’ affordances are greatly influenced by personal traits with interactivity tendency. The findings imply the embodied cognition process of personal informatics in which technological qualities are shaped by users’ perception, traits, and context. The results establish a foundation for wearable technologies through a heuristic quality assessment tool from a user embodied cognitive process. They confirm the validity and utility of applying affordances to the design of IoT as a useful concept, as well as prove that the optimum mix of affordances is crucial to the success or failure of IoT design.
Article outline
  • Literature review
    • Affordances in IoT
    • ECT and affordance
    • PI as IoT technology
  • Methods
    • Mixed methods
    • Qualitative method
      • Instrument validity and reliability
  • Survey
    • Design: Survey development
    • Survey measurement
    • Hypotheses
      • Satisfaction and confirmation
      • Technological affordances and expectation
      • Content quality (information quality)
      • System quality
      • Service quality
      • Expectation-confirmation of affective affordances
    • Fit indices
    • Results from the User model
    • Discussions regarding the survey
  • Experiment
    • Experiment design
    • Experiment measurement
    • Results from the experiment
      • Main effects by feedback type
      • Interaction effects
      • Moderating effects by interactivity tendency
    • Discussion regarding the experiment
  • Results
    • Summary of findings
      • Discussion from the triangulation of data
  • Implications: Affordance is in the eye of the Beholder
  • Limitations
  • References
References (39)
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