Work

Fostering self-efficacy through usability and emotional product design? An explorative study

Year: 2024

Type: article

Abstract: Raising the user’s self-confidence is a promising strategy to reduce product-related user stigma. In the context of product usage, the commonly used term self-confidence refers to the psychological construct of self-efficacy. To strengthen a user’s self-efficacy through product design, providing both good usability and emotionality in a product seems to be a reasonable starting point. However, their suitability and validity for this purpose has not yet been sufficiently assessed. This paper examines whether self-efficacy would be associated with perceptions of a product’s usability and emotionality. By conducting an online survey (n = 105; stigma-sensitive product demonstrator: walker), it was confirmed that the perception of good usability and emotionality of walkers were positively associated with the user’s perceived self-efficacy. Moreover, a negative interaction effect was identified showing that the association between emotionality and self-efficacy increased with lower levels of perceived usability and vice versa. This may indicate that emotions can compensate the importance of usability at least to some extent.

Source: Research in Engineering Design

DOI: 10.1007/s00163-024-00435-9

Authors: Tina Buker, Stefan T. Kamin, Judith van Remmen, Sandro Wartzack, Jörg Miehling

Institutions: Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg, Fraunhofer Center for Applied Research on Supply Chain Services, Fraunhofer Institute for Integrated Circuits

Language: English

Topic: Innovative Human-Technology Interaction

Subfield: Human-Computer Interaction

Field: Computer Science

Domain: Physical Sciences

Open Access status: hybrid

Estimated APC paid: $3,890

Funders: Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg, Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft