Identifying Affordances from and Categorizing Consumer Product Reviews
Min Amanda Chou · TSpace (University of Toronto) · 2015
Studying affordances allows designers to better understand how their products can be used by consumers in both desired and undesired ways. Online product reviews are a free and accessible source of information on consumer product usage, which suggests unforeseen uses and misuses of products that may inspire the development or redesign of products. To simplify the process of identifying affordances in reviews, relevant cue phrases are highlighted. Then, linguistic features for clustering review sentences are examined to identify characteristics of informative reviews. Cue phrases classifying review content for purposes of product improvement are also highlighted and discussed. The usage of verbs in stating affordances, as well as topic modelling of reviews for identifying affordances are also examined.