THE USER-PRODUCT INTERACTION EVALUATION (UPIE) MODEL: A CASE STUDY

Abstract

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 identi cation of relationships between human experience, affordance, knowledge and context-of-use, and consequently reveals the relationships that in uence 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 UserProduct Interaction Evaluation model was created, and how it can aid designers in the design process.