'Broken expectations' from a global business perspective

Abstract

Especially in the past few years, there has been an increase in the rejection rate of interactive consumer electronics products in the field, not due to broken hardware or software, but due to 'broken expectations' of users. However, operational methods to capture triggering contextual reasons are not functional in the industry. In addressing this gap, we propose systematic analysis of qualitative user feedback data resources from the field by utilizing our Disconfirmed Expectations Ontology (DEO). DEO provides for an efficient means to elicit relevant -but currently unrecognizable-feedback from the field to communicate that to the respective units in a product development process. We further demonstrate the utilization of DEO on a rich qualitative data set regarding the Apple iPhone™.