Personal Attribute Judgments - Modeling Users' Experiences with Interactive Systems - page 39

thus do not fully exploit the true value of the Repertory Grid Technique, which is
to quantify rich qualitative insights. Averaging procedures, on the other hand, treat
diversity among participants as error and thereby contradict the basic idea of The
Repertory Grid and relevant personal attribute elicitation techniques.
Last, we proposed an initial quantitative technique that aims at inquiring into the
diverse views that different individuals might have on a set of products. The tech-
nique employs Multi-Dimensional Scaling in a) identifying homogeneous groups of
individuals, and b) eliciting a different view for each homogeneous group of indi-
viduals.
The technique was applied in a study that tried to assess the differences between
designers' and users' perceptions on a set of early conceptual designs. The results
from the study corroborated prior findings (Kujala and Kauppinen, 2004) suggest-
ing that designers may fall short in accounting for users' views on their product
and foreseeing their preferences. Surprisingly, the diversity between the designers
and users was larger than the diversity across different user groups. This might be
affected by the different exposure of these two diverse groups to the different con-
cepts, thus leading to a relative agreement across the different users' in comparison
to the designers group. One has to note that designers were explicitly asked to re-
flect on the way that this specific user group would perceive this set of products.
In this way the gap between designers' and users' perceptions was minimized to
reflect actual design practice where assumptions and claims are made for a specific
user group. These insights highlight the need for grounding design decisions that are
made early in the concept design phase on quantifiable empirical data about users'
preferences.