“Do consumers want to design unique products on the internet? A ...

categorised. It was a surprise <strong>to</strong> the researcher just how social the Blog Forum was,
with the vast majority of <strong>to</strong>pics started (over 80%) having nothing <strong>to</strong> do with
Threadless or <strong>design</strong> in general. While showing how close the community is and just
how much of their day <strong>to</strong> day lives they shared with other members, off-<strong>to</strong>pic
subjects such as “Which superhero are you?” or “I’m going veggie” would have
helped very little in answering this studies research questions.
Figure 6: Frequency of Responses for Topics 3a-3e
The second stage of the participant observation was <strong>to</strong> look at the category of
communication used in the comments section below each submitted <strong>design</strong>. The
submissions chosen were the first 10 submitted <strong>design</strong>s mentioned on the “Blog Forum”
during the first stage of the participant observation. In <strong>to</strong>tal over the ten <strong>design</strong>s 589
comments were posted and these were all categorised. Table 4 shows that the most
Adam Fletcher – Do <strong>consumers</strong> <strong>want</strong> <strong>to</strong> <strong>design</strong> <strong>unique</strong> product on the internet.
2006
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