Designing for Sustainable User Experience in Smart Products: A Grounded Analysis based on User Reviews

Smart products are often defined through techno-centric frame-works that privilege system capabilities over user experience. This paper adopts a user-experience-centered perspective to investigate how smart appliances are perceived, integrated, and valued in everyday domestic practices, with the aim of informing the design of smart products that support sustainable and long-term adoption. Drawing on an Informed Grounded Theory approach, we analyze ap-proximately 250 extended user reviews from Amazon and YouTube across twelve smart home appliances. Existing smartness frameworks are integrated while allowing experiential constructs to emerge inductively from user discourse. Results reveal a distinction between smart product design elements and experi-enced elements, leading to six experiential dimensions: perceived smartness, per-ceived technology value, experienced agency, product trust, product sense-mak-ing, and experienced sustainability. Sustainability emerges not as a behavior to be enforced, but as an experiential, value-adding product quality. The study contributes to a grounded analytical perspective to support the design of meaningful and sustainable smart product interactions.