An affordance lens for wearable information systems

ABSTRACT

The proliferation of wearable technologies calls for the development of conceptual lenses to understand the drivers of their success. This research employs an affordance lens rooted in the individual perspective of Activity Theory to examine personal information systems built around wearable sensors. Since wearable devices have size constraints, designers have produced a variety of simple technology products lacking screens and buttons, but supplemented with customised apps. Due to their novelty, the impact of these minimalist wearables on the quality of the user experience is not yet well understood. To investigate this issue, this study proposes a theoretically driven framework of affordances and applies it to qualitatively analyse a sample of online user reviews from a specific fitness tracker wristband. The findings suggest that minimalist wearables produce a more complex user experience if affordances are not properly balanced and combined. Specific usability challenges stem from affordance integration failures and inconsistencies. These results have theoretical and practical implications. Overall, an affordance lens offers a unified view of user experience that is valuable for researchers and practitioners seeking to understand what makes modern wearable information systems transparent to use at the physical and digital level.

ACCEPTING EDITOR:

• Kieran Conboy

KEYWORDS:

• Activity theory
• affordance
• individual information systems
• usability
• wearables

Acknowledgments

The author is indebted to Julian McAuley for facilitating access to the online review database and to the research assistants who coded the content of the reviews. Portions of this manuscript were presented at the Pre-ECIS 2017 “Developing Activity Theory in Information Studies” DATIS Workshop, and AMCIS 2017 “The Internet of Things: Emerging IS Research Challenges” mini-track. This manuscript has benefitted from the feedback provided by the chairs, reviewers, and attendees of these conferences. Special thanks to the participants of the Information Systems and Statistics Seminar Series of Baruch College for their useful comments and suggestions.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Provenance

The theoretical foundation of this article was presented at a pre-ECIS 2017 workshop “Developing Activity Theory in Information Studies (DATIS)”. The preliminary empirical results reported in this manuscript were presented at the 2017 Americas Conference on Information Systems (AMCIS) in Boston, MA in August. This manuscript builds on these two earlier pieces and presents a more complete theoretical framework, more detailed empirical analyses, and a more comprehensive discussion of theoretical and practical implications.