ABSTRACT
The objective of this chapter is to consider the behavior of employees at work in an organizational setting as consumers of information and communication technology (ICT) products. The term "consumer" is more often applied to members of the public and it may seem unusual to apply it to people at work. Indeed, there are several features of being a consumer of a product that may not seem appropriate to a person at work. First, employees may have little say in the purchase of the products that they use at work. Second, it might be presumed that they have little choice about how they use the product; we might assume that they are told what tasks to perform with the product, trained in its use and thereafter expected to meet performance standards in doing work with the product. On this basis, employees might better be classed as "product users": they may make heavy use of a product and, for that reason, product design is very important to them, but they may be regarded as passive users, i.e., their motivation to use the product, whether they like it, value it, have a good experience of it, etc., may seem less important. In this chapter, I hope to show that, in the realm of ICT products, employees behave as consumers in their use of these products in the sense that they exercise a lot of discretion in what they use and how they use it, and that the patterns of use they display have many implications for the design of the products.
