A Case Study for the User-Product Interaction Evaluation (UPIE) Model

(Published Paper)

This paper investigates how a new approach to evaluating user-product interaction can benefit the product designer’s interpretations of evaluation results. It describes an experiment that studied users’ interactions with a high-end coffee maker, through the lenses of human science and user-product evaluation by using a combination of affordance theory and Structural Equation Modeling. The concept of our proposed User-Product Interaction Evaluation (UPIE) model is derived from identification of relationships between human experience, affordance, knowledge and context-of-use, and consequently, reveals the relationships that influence designers’ and researchers’ concepts of evaluation in product interactions. These relationships and concepts were used to form a hypothesis that certain evaluation principles of statistics can inform the evaluation model of a design, especially with regard to the aspects of affordance that trigger people’s understanding of a product’s use. In this paper, we describe how the User-Product Interaction Evaluation model was created, and how it can aid designers in the design process.

Bulletin of JSSD (Japanese Society of Science and Design) Vol. 62, No. 5, 2016 Tokyo, Japan