Mining consumer experiences of repairing electronics: Product design insights and business lessons learned

Despite various efforts to shed light on the different aspects of repair and maintenance processes, our entire understanding of the repair practices done on consumer electronics comes from either the manufactures or professional repair experts. There is a lack of systematic, well-documented studies of repair practices by unprofessional individual consumers. Understanding the factors contributing to unprofessional repair practices is a necessity to lengthen the life span of the product and to promote repair as an eco-behavior among individual consumers. We have investigated 4210 break and fix narratives reported by consumers of electronic devices in a survey conducted by iFixit.com - a wiki-based website for repair manuals - in order to apperceive the most common failures, repair practices and challenges that individual users face in their interactive experiences with product repair. A comprehensive text mining set up has been applied to extract the most frequent product break stories and their causes of failure. Regression analyses have been employed to examine the possible links between consumer experiences of repairing electronics and their future purchase behaviors. The results of analyses indicate that in addition to the consumers' attitude toward repair, various product design features offer different levels of repair convenience, which may eventually impact the consumer's future purchase decisions.