Sixteenth International Conference on Design Principles & Practices

Abstract

Wearable technologies display a fast-growing market trajectory, with predictions of market for wearables will reach $138bn by 2025. Although there is increasing demand for wearable technologies especially for performance, health and wellbeing, the biggest obstacle to sustainability of wearables is that these products are abandoned by users after a short use period. One of the most important reasons for this situation is the negative experiences of the users while using these products such as battery life, usability, etc. The user experience progresses in a process over time in stages of before use, during use, and after use of products. The important point of the pre-use experience is the expectations and needs of users from a product. Expectations are an important factor for user experience, expectations will affect the overall experience. The before-use experience is directly related to users’ expectations from wearable technologies. This study aims to identify user expectations from wearable technology that could lead to longer-term product-user attachment, minimizing abandonments. We surveyed 400 people focusing on pragmatic and hedonic expectations from wearable technology used for sports performance. The participants included individuals who have prior experience in using wearable technology products as well as those with no experience. Expectations related to pragmatic experiences such as usability, wearability, and hedonic experiences such as emotion and self-expression have been analyzed statistically using an independent t-test. Results indicated that there is no significant difference between the expectations of people who have used wearable technologies before and those who have not used them.