A Heterophenomenological Framework for Analyzing User Experiences with Affordances

ABSTRACT

For user experience studies, the affordance theory has been used to describe a user’s intuitive perception and action. This theory, however, has often faced problems in application due to the different viewpoints of the ecological psychology and other fields of application study. To address this issue, we adopt two strategies in this study. First, we review the existing explications of the affordance theory in ecological psychology and rectify issues that have hindered the use of concepts in the affordance theory for user experience analysis. In addressing these issues, we suggest revised formal expressions and propose a new typological system. Second, by organizing the revised formal expressions and the new typology of the affordance into a heterophenomenological frame, we suggest a research framework for user experience analysis. We present an application example of the framework for demonstration purposes. We expect that the suggested framework will enable better descriptions of various phenomena occurring in the physical, social, and self dimensions and designs of products and services.

Notes

1. The term, “animal” has been used in the ecological psychology to refer general organisms including humans. However, since this term covers a broad range and may lead confuse to understanding some ideas of the affordance theory in the context of user experience study, we will replace this term with “human” hereafter.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by The National Research Foundation of Korea(NRF) grant funded by the Korea government(MSIT) [NRF-2020R1A2C4002026]; The Ministry of Education of the Republic of Korea and the National Research Foundation of Korea [NRF-2019S1A5A8035093].

Notes on contributors

Taehyun Ha

Taehyun Ha is a senior researcher in the Future Technology Analysis Center at Korea Institute of Science and Technology (KISTI). He received his Ph.D. degree in Interaction Science at Sungkyunkwan University in 2020. His research interests include Human-Computer Interaction, User Experience, and Data Mining.

Sangwon Lee

Sangwon Lee is an associate professor in the department of Interaction Science/Human-Artificial Intelligence Interaction at Sungkyunkwan University. He received his PhD degree from the Pennsylvania State University in 2010. His research interests lie in Human-Computer Interaction, User Experience, and Affective Computing.