Products Change after the Launch

It is not only consumers we must understand in their social settings; it is also the products. Products are created and consumed within a culture. Manufacturers, advertisers, and users invest them with different meanings. Thus the product has a social dimension conferred on it in the form of possibilities of use; only some kinds of interactions are possible. The social dimension also includes meanings attached to product users that shape each user's identity through possession and use of the product.[9]

Sometimes the meanings given to products can be so distinctive that they multiply the product into different cultural artifacts. When bicycles were introduced, for example, they were both strongly opposed and passionately loved by the consumers of the late nineteenth century. The antagonists saw the vehicle as a dangerous and grandiose gadget meant for showing off, and the protagonists saw it as an exciting, sporty appurtenance for adventurous men. Products can provoke controversy and user ambivalence-they do it all the time. In the case of the bicycle, cultural debate about the meaning of the thing abated and the product got its more-or-less stable meaning as a means of transportation (although today we can see the return of a racier image in form of the mountain bike).[10]

What's radical here is the idea that products keep changing after the launch phase (Figure 5.1).[11] In the case of mobile phones, it means that the phone has travelled a trajectory from an expensive showoff tool to an everyman's communication platform. The meaning of the phone (and its relation to the consumer) is in a way renegotiated in the daily context again and again. It is also evident that every new-product launch-new models within the same product category-challenges the role the phone plays.

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Figure 5.1:   Products keep changing after the original launch phase. [From Pantzar10]

The same people may have different ideas about the very same product at different points in time, partly because the product tends to become more acceptable over time. When the short message service (SMS) was launched, initially nothing noteworthy happened. Yet when SMS began to be widely used, GSM phones exhibited a new usage pattern. The phone became more than a phone-it was now a textual communication tool that allowed people to keep in touch in a way never seen before. A whole culture was created by users for users. The ways people relate to each other changed, and users learned usage behaviors that they could not have imagined before.

When SMS was new, it was unfamiliar to many users. Elderly consumers may have seen it as especially strange. Now we see more and more senior consumers using text messages, an application first conceived for teenagers. In this way, users may slowly adjust to the product and thus relate to it more positively with time. With new users come new meanings for the product, and meanings in turn change attitudes, which definitely influence consumer perceptions of the product. Manufacturers can't afford to ignore new meanings created in the marketplace when conceiving new-product versions. If they do, they may expect to be surprised by consumers rejecting the new product.

To recap, the social nature of users-their heterogeneity, for example-is not the only new subject of study for usability investigations. The products themselves have a less coherent nature with a changing image. Culture as a source of meanings should thus be included in the analysis and acceptance of products. But, instead of just adding 'culture' to the traditional model of human-computer interaction, a more radical step is to reconceive the whole product development chain as a locus for creating and reproducing culture. Socially shaped meanings are inscribed in or attached to products, which then are transferred to the everyday life of the users to become what they will.

[9]G. McCracken, Culture and Consumption. New Approaches to the Symbolic Character of Consumer Goods and Activities. Indiana Univ. Press, 1990.

[10]W. E. Bijker, Of Bicycles, Bakelites, and Bulbs. Toward a Theory of Sociotechnical Change. Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1999.

[11]M. Pantzar, Kuinka teknologia kesytetään. Kulutuksen tieteestä kulutuksen taiteeseen (How to Tame Technology). Helsinki: Tammi, 1996.



Mobile Usability(c) How Nokia Changed the Face of the Mobile Phone
Mobile Usability: How Nokia Changed the Face of the Mobile Phone
ISBN: 0071385142
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2005
Pages: 142

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