ABSTRACT
Technological innovation leading to new technology products and services is one indicator of a society’s progress.Yet it is not a simple consequence that all consumers will wish to make use of them. For instance, by the first quarter of 2012, it was reported that 8.12 million adults in the UK (16.1 per cent) had never used the Internet (Office of National Statistics, 2012). This paper was stimulated by a need to understand how people in general react to new technologies and what aspects of new developments might encourage or discourage their take up. Mack and Sharples (2009) found in a study of mobile phones that while usability is an important attribute of successful products and interfaces, other aspects are equally if not more important including: features, aesthetics, and cost. Product appearance also plays an important role in consumer choice (Creusen and Schoormans, 2004) so it is interesting to study how people feel about product concepts that they cannot see so need to visualise. Previous evidence of research with young people aged between five and seventeen revealed that they could evaluate the cons as well as the pros of consumer technology (Maguire, 2001).
