Conceptualizing perceived affordances in social media interaction design.

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.