Conceptualizing perceived affordances in social media interaction design

TLDR

The paper develops a theoretical concept of perceived affordance and proposes a framework to guide social media interaction design. The authors review affordance literature, propose a typology and integrative framework from a sociomateriality perspective, and illustrate it with a crowdsourcing example. The study finds that perceived affordances are multi‑faceted and, when integrated into design, enhance content, form, usability, and sociability, serving as a unifying element across users, artifacts, and context.

Abstract

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to theoretically develop the concept of perceived affordance based on the existing studies, and to construct a conceptual framework to show how perceived affordances can facilitate the interaction design of social media. Design/methodology/approach The paper provides a review of the relevant literature on affordance and perceived affordance, and conceptually proposes a typology of perceived affordances in social media and an integrative framework for interaction design from sociomateriality perspective. Furthermore, a brief empirical example on the interaction design of crowdsourcing systems is used to ground and illustrate the authors' conceptual framework. Findings The paper shows that the perceived affordances may have multi‐facet characteristics and the interaction design of social media should reflect the multi‐dimensional perceived affordances. The perceived affordances can support or facilitate the design of basic elements of social media, such as content and form, to enhance both usability (human‐computer interaction) and sociability (human‐human interaction). A position of constitutive entanglement does not privilege either users or social media artifacts, nor does it provide a rigid triangle among these three components. Instead, the perceived affordances play a critical role in integrating the key components in social media interaction design as an ensemble. Originality/value The paper attempts to explore and develop the concept of perceived affordance and employ it as a theoretical lens to underpin interaction design of social media. Overall, the authors' study contributes to the design science literature in the information management field by elaborating a new theoretical perspective and providing a conceptual framework for the researchers and designers.