Does design matter? Affordance perspective on smartphone usage

Purpose – The aim of this research is to propose a new prospective and methodology to explore how design affordance affects smartphone usage with a contextual approach to investigating the relationship among design features, functional affordance, descriptive beliefs, and inferential beliefs. Design/methodology/approach – This research was conducted in two phases to explore the effect of design affordance on adoption of smartphone. In the first phase, the paper investigated how smartphone's innovative design features afford user's functional perception. Subsequently, two affordance-based beliefs – intuition and diversity – were elicited from the design features of smartphone's user interface. In the second phase, a theoretical model was developed and empirically assessed for exploring the effects of the elicited affordance-based variables along with the innovation diffusion theory (IDT) variables on smartphone adoption. Findings – Results show that the diversity has significant positive effect on both perceived usefulness and perceived ease of use of smartphone usage. However, the effect of intuition is significant on perceived ease of use but not on perceived usefulness. Of the IDT variables, only relative advantage is statistically significant for attitudes. Research limitations/implications – The paper only focused on exploring some innovative design features and associated affordances for smartphone adoption. Other design features should be taken into consideration in future research. Practical implications – The result of this research implies that managers or designers should take advantage of the current advanced technology to develop diverse and intuitive design features on smartphone for attracting user's attention and affection. Originality/value – There is a contradiction in prior studies concerning the explanations for the causes of ICT artifact adoption while preserving both the generalizability of TAM model and the accuracy and salience to practice. This research contributes a new vision and methodology to explain what and how innovative design features influence user's attitudes towards smartphone usage from the affordance perspective.