An affective, normative and functional approach to designing user experiences for wearables

Abstract

One trend that rivals and stands to potentially eclipse the transformational effect of the smartphone, is the rise of wearable computing devices. While wearables have received proliferated adoption in recent times, their uncommon form factor poses challenges to designers and many such devices fail to achieve sustained user engagement. Within the HCI stream of IS related research, there is a limited amount of studies that address theory inspired design of actual IT artifacts, or address the ubiquitous context of technology use. In this research-in-progress work, we adopt an action design research approach and drawing upon theories from the psychology and technology adoption literature, we develop a set of design principles that informs the design of user experiences for wearable computing devices. We come up with 6 specific principles which are derived from 3 main perspectives - an affective quality perspective, a social norms perspective and a utility accrual perspective.