The experience of using everyday tools with the use of repertory grid

Introduction: Paying attention to users' emotional desires and facilitating user-product interaction have become an essential component in design, production and marketing. User experience includes user’s perceptions and feedback while using or anticipating the use of products. Optimizing user experience can increase the satisfaction of users, motivate customers to buy products and, consequently, improve the competitive position of manufacturers in the market. Product designers need to carefully identify and evaluate user’s needs in different groups of products to create different features, semantic, sensory, and behavioral functions in the product and improve the perceived user experience of the product. So far, different methods have been proposed to collect users' opinions and demands regarding different types of products. Surveying and focusing on groups are the traditional methods in market research, which have their own strengths and weaknesses. There are some integrated solutions proposed to solve problems by these methods. Designers and manufacturers face an urgent need to use the different proposed methods to accurately extract demands of users in practical examples, so that they can understand these methods and their application in real projects. This research seeks to identify the needs of users and evaluate the user experience with some types of these products.
Methodology: This research is based on a practical approach that applies the repertory grid technique to extract factors involved in user experience in everyday products for chopping onion. This technique is a semi-structured method to define different aspects of a phenomenon from the personal viewpoints of subjects by minimizing the possible biases of the researcher. Based on this, a case study of that technique is conducted to extract the factors involved in the user experience in everyday onion chopping tools. The implementation of the technique has three main stages including element selection, construct extraction, and identifying element relationship to constructs by using content analysis. For this purpose, by interviewing 20 users of onion chopping tools, a conceptual model was presented on the factors affecting user satisfaction in this category of products. The reason for choosing the onion chopping tool was the daily use of these tools, and the target population consisted of 20 to 40-year-old female users who did daily cooking activities. Seven elements were arranged based on the subjects' suggestions for onion chopping tools. The interview was conducted in a kitchen with the presence of the mentioned onion chopping tools, and the subjects were allowed to do onion chopping by any of the tools they wished. To discover the constructs, the elements were provided to the subjects in the form of triple comparisons, and then an in-depth interview was conducted.
Results and discussion: As many as 545 personal constructs were extracted in the initial stage. After the content analysis, they were reduced to 42 final constructs. The priority of the final constructs was extracted based on an online questionnaire, and the superiority of the elements was determined on the Likert scale. The obtained scores were entered and analyzed in the Idiogrid software version 2.4, and information was extracted in three stages including statistical information of structures, and statistical information of the elements and cognitive map of elements. Then, principal component analysis was done to understand the relationship between the structures and elements and their graphic expression showing the combination of the constructs and elements. In general, the range of the scores obtained in the structures was from 2.85 to 4.85, which has little dispersion according to the determined range (1 to 5). This result can indicate that the extracted structures have correctly identified the needs of users which are more or less important. Also, the results showed that the structures related to the safety criteria are the most important, and structures related to appearance and personal preferences of the subjects are the least important in this type of products. The results of the comparing the tools showed the strengths and weaknesses of each tool according to the extracted structures, the discovery of which will lead to the creation of new and optimized products.
Conclusion: Since there are many dimensions in evaluating user-centric products, in order to achieve user’s satisfaction, it is necessary to pay attention to all of the effective items in user experience. The number and details of the structures obtained showed that the repertory grid technique can be used as a suitable solution for extracting the demands of users about different products. By using multiple comparisons, this method, brings up various cases in the minds of users, which are not expressed in traditional interview methods. Also, comparing the users of different products creates a situation that can include a wider range of user demands. This is the strong point of this method in comparison with the focus group method because, to uncover underlying hidden needs, approaching unusual or off-target users can provide an opportunity for product development.