An Affective, Normative and Functional Approach to Designing User Experiences for Wearables

This research article considers the problem of sustained user engagement within wearable computing devices (wearables) which make up an important segment of the growing Internet of Things. While these devices have received proliferated adoption, they appear to be abandoned after a period of use – a situation which is of concern to industry stakeholders. To address this problem, we adopt an action design research approach, which emphasizes the interaction of designers, users and experts in shaping the design of IT artifacts, to develop a comprehensive set of design principles for wearables. Our findings are as follows: we identify 3 main theoretical perspectives to inform this endeavor - an affective quality perspective, a social norms perspective and a utility accrual perspective. From these perspectives, we further derive 6 actionable design principles - sensor based interaction, normative adherence, isolated functionality, complementary value, glanceability and computational offloading.