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.