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Using Social Psychology in Product DesignMany companies are concerned with how best to measure emotional and subjective user reactions to their products and systems. Common measures such as surveys, interviews, and focus groups are often used to give designers a gauge of how a device or service meets the expectations of target users.
These traditional methods, although useful, have shown that they are often inadequate in fully understanding a user’s emotional reaction to the product of interest. Well-founded in social psychology, interdependence theory can provide usability researchers with several useful constructs in analyzing user satisfaction.
Interdependence theory is established on the principle that the very essence of any interpersonal relationship is found in interaction between individuals. These interactions are highly dependent on the situations that people find themselves in when faced with interference in the relationship, with interference being a term used to describe conflict, miscommunication or opposing viewpoints. This founding idea can be directly related to a user’s experience with a company’s products. This is to say that the degree of user satisfaction is a function of the user’s interaction with the product of interest and the situation in which it is used.
Just as with interpersonal relationships, user/product interaction is depende
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23/11/2004 | Viewed 6,330 time(s)
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