Devices vs Media: Which part of tech products do people value?
Tech products such as smartphones, laptops and e-book readers have become some of the most widely used and loved products across the globe. At the same time, they are being thrown away and replaced much more frequently than other types of consumer products. Is the trend towards smart products reducing how much we value our possessions or is value instead being digitised? This project investigated how users assign value to the brands, products and services they encounter within tech-product systems.
Research question
How do users assign value within tech product systems?
Project OutcomeS
Data-driven insights and 6 design directions for bridging the physical-digital divide.
When a person has a positive tech experience (e.g. video calling a family member), which products and services do they assign value?
Procedure
1-2 hour interview and task-based sessions were conducted with 20 individuals. Discussion focused on each person’s 3 most important tech devices.
Individuals were given the task of listing all the thoughts that come to mind when they engage with different components within a tech-product system (e.g. the device, a photo album or an app).
Collected data included 12 hours of interview transcripts, 1579 written responses and 162 ratings.
Data was analysed by thematically coding all responses and drawing comparisons between the different units of data.
Association cards described the thoughts brought to mind by the physical device and digital contents of people’s tech products such as phones, laptops, game consoles and cameras.
Participants rated and discussed the meaningfulness of the physical device and digital media contents of their tech products.
“those [digital] photos are a part of the meaning of who I am. They help define me.”
Physical touchpoints of tech devices were primarily thought of in terms of their aesthetic qualities (coded as materiality in the above graph), however digital product and service touchpoints were mostly thought of in terms of the experiences they provide.
Key insights
Tech products were valued and loved to the same degree as other categories of consumer products, however this value was mostly assigned to the digital contents, not the physical device.
Digital information stored within tech devices was the primary source of meaning in most reported instances.
Physical devices were often seen to be important but highly replaceable.
Without value being assigned to the physical product itself, people are more likely to throw away or replace their tech devices.
Tech companies can adopt various strategies to bridge the physical-digital divide to ensure tech devices and real-world touchpoints are valued to the same extent as digital products and services.
Design Directions
Many of today’s tech companies are offering products and services that function across both real-world and digital spaces, yet our findings show that users assign value in different ways across these two spaces. We analysed our findings to come up with 6 design directions for tech companies looking to bridge the physical-digital divide in user experiences.
Tech devices are sometimes like wardrobes; they contain a number of valued items but they themselves are seen by users as just another storage commodity.
Companies delivering media like music, photos, videos and games can capitalise on the value of physically containing significant items by designing devices to be more like jewellery boxes or leather-bound family photo albums: elegant, protective containers of valued media.
With cloud-storage and online streaming becoming increasingly popular, devices are being valued as enablers; allowing users to view, listen, read, play, communicate, create, curate, explore, learn and reminisce.
Branding and aesthetics for these products can increase perceived value by focusing on how they empower users (for example, the motivation gained from having your favourite music at the gym or the self-improvement opportunities from reading particular e-books).
People are acquiring increasingly large collections of personal media like photos, music, videos and messages, but attempts to bring these digital collections into the real-world have been ineffective (as seen in the failure of digital photo frames). This is partly due to how our brains cluster collections through patterns and the lack of structure given to our digital collections of media (where photos of receipts are mixed in with photos of friends and family).
To help users to form mental links between their media collections and physical devices (and in doing so assign greater personal value to their devices), tech products can be built as a set of objects, allowing for the division of complex digital collections amongst several real-world items. An example of what this might look like can be seen in the Melo music player.
Touchscreens have become almost synonymous with tech devices but they often lead to products with little tactility or feedback - contributing to the divide between real-world and digital user experiences.
Different forms of input and output can be used to better blend physical and digital spaces and create technological products that innovate beyond the all-in-one screen-based computers.
At the height of their popularity, BlackBerry phones contained work-specific features like a full QWERTY keyboard and push email that gave clear associations with a businessperson identity.
While many companies standardise their products and services to suit any user context, there are opportunities for specialising functionality to particular roles and aspects of a user’s identity to more strongly convey its value.
Tech products enable a variety of meaningful experiences through communication, play, creation and curation; yet our findings show these experiences are unlikely to be associated with the devices themselves.
Companies looking to expand their offerings to real-world products can ensure these newly developed products are valued by users by adopting tangible, embodied or hybrid interactions. An early example of this type of interaction can be seen in Durell Bishop’s marble answering machine.