Value Co-Creation in Smart Services: A Functional Affordances Perspective on Smart Personal Assistants

In the realm of smart services, smart personal assistants (SPAs) have become a popular medium for value co-creation between service providers and users. The market success of SPAs is largely based on their innovative material properties, such as natural language user interfaces, machine learning-powered request handling and service provision, and anthropomorphism. In different combinations, these properties offer users entirely new ways to intuitively and interactively achieve their goals and thus co-create value with service providers. But how does the nature of the SPA shape value co-creation processes? In this paper, we look through a functional affordances lens to theorize about the effects of different types of SPAs (i.e., with different combinations of material properties) on users’ value co-creation processes. Specifically, we collected SPAs from research and practice by reviewing scientific literature and web resources, developed a taxonomy of SPAs’ material properties, and performed a cluster analysis to group SPAs of a similar nature. We then derived 2 general and 11 cluster-specific propositions on how different material properties of SPAs can yield different affordances for value co-creation. With our work, we point out that smart services require researchers and practitioners to fundamentally rethink value co-creation as well as revise affordances theory to address the dynamic nature of smart technology as a service counterpart

Conversational agent or direct manipulation in human-system interaction

Contains fulltext : 41115.pdf (publisher's version ) (Closed access)In this paper we investigate the usability of speech-centric multimodal interaction by comparing two systems that support the same unfamiliar task, viz. bathroom design. One version implements a conversational agent (CA) metaphor, while the alternative one is based on direct manipulation (DM). Twenty subjects, 10 males and 10 females, none of whom had recent experience with bathroom (re-)design completed the same task with both systems. After each task we collected objective measures (task completion time, task completion rate, number of actions performed, speech and pen recognition errors) and subjective measures in the form of Likert Scale ratings. We found that the task completion rate for the CA system is higher than for the DM system. Nevertheless, subjects did not agree on their preference for one of the systems: those subjects who were able to use the DM system effectively preferred that system, mainly because it was faster for them, and they felt more in control. We conclude that for multimodal CA systems to become widely accepted substantial improvements in system architecture and in the performance of almost all individual modules are needed