Modeling the diversity in users’ responses to early concepts with the Repertory Grid Technique

Name Evangelos Karapanos
Advisor Jean-Bernard Martens

How do we measure users’ responses to early conceptual designs? Traditional approaches employ the use of standardized questionnaires. Such approaches force researchers to define the qualities that they wish to measure a-priori. But how do we know if we measure all relevant qualities, and how are we sure that all participants use the same qualities (criteria) in evaluating a set of products? In other words, do we capture the diverse ways with which users evaluate artifacts?

Using the Repertory Grid Technique, a structured interview technique, we elicit the dimensions that are relevant for each participant and we ask each participant to rate the artifacts only on the qualities that he/she considers relevant. We then use Multi-Dimensional Scaling procedures in trying to make sense out of these complex quantitative data.

Relevant publications
Karapanos E., Martens J.-B., Hassenzahl M. Accounting for Diversity in Subjective Judgments. In Proceedings of the 27th international Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (Boston, MA, USA, April 04 – 09, 2009). CHI ‘09. ACM, New York, NY, 639-648. DOI= doi.acm.org/10.1145/1518701.1518801

Karapanos, E. & Martens, J.-B. (2008) The quantitative side of the Repertory Grid Technique: some concerns. In the proceedings of the workshop Now Let’s Do It in Practice: User Experience Evaluation Methods in Product Development, Human factors in computing systems CHI ‘08. Florence.