Introduction - Modeling Users' Experiences with Interactive Systems - page 9

level, perceptual judgments, were indeed more uni-dimensional, i.e. they displayed
higher consistency across different individuals.
In the field of design, Csikszentmihalyi and Rochberg-Halton (1981) asked indi-
viduals to select personally relevant objects located in their homes and describe what
makes them special. Csikszentmihalyi and Rochberg-Halton (1981) found that the
value of such objects did not lie in some objectively defined quality, e.g. uniformly
appreciated aesthetics, but to the personal meaning that people attached to these ob-
jects and how these participated in their social lives and creation of self-identity.
These results suggest that while we may all agree in perceptual judgments, e.g.
color of a given product, these judgment have far less power in predicting our pref-
erences in comparison to higher level judgments, e.g. its beauty. Hofstede (2001)
suggested that human perceptions may exist at three different levels: a) some might
be uniquely personal, having significance for an individual because of his or her
own associations; b) others might have significance to a specific social or cultural
group through shared meaning; and c) others are universal, related to human nature
at an innate or fundamental level.
In Karapanos et al. (2008b) we argued that diversity may exist at two different
stages in the formation of an overall evaluative judgment (see figure 1.1). Percep-
tual diversity lies in the process of forming product quality perceptions (e.g. novel,
easy to use) on the basis of product features. For instance, different individuals may
infer different levels on a given quality of the same product, e.g. disagree on its
novelty. Evaluative diversity lies in the process of forming overall evaluations of the
product (e.g. good-bad) on the basis of product quality perceptions. For instance,
different individuals may form different evaluative judgments even while having no
disagreement on the perceived quality of the product, e.g. both might think of it as a
novel and hard-to-use product, but they disagree on the relative importance of each
quality.
Fig. 1.1 A modification of Hassenzahl's 2005 framework, highlighting diversity at two stages
in forming overall judgments about products.
Considering the second stage, i.e. evaluative diversity, one might assume a cer-
tain universal hierarchical structure on the relative importance of different qualities.
For instance, Jordan (2000) drew on Maslow's (1946) theory of human needs to
propose a fixed hierarchical structure of the relative importance of functionality,
usability and pleasure in the context of Human-Computer Interaction. According to
this, a product has to provide useful and usable functionality before hedonic aspects,