Design evaluation

Most consumer products have to fulfil a variety of requirements to appeal to consumers and ensure market success. Today, one key factor is the design of the product. Especially for products in highly competitive markets, products with high costs of development and long product renewal intervals, new design concepts have to be chosen very deliberately. There is a thin red line between being too innovative and being too conservative, the former causing reluctant consumer behaviour and the latter generating boring and disliked products in the long run. Therefore, sophisticated and everyday-life relevant techniques of design evaluation have to be used. The present article describes typical problems of standard evaluation strategies and develops solutions to overcome them. The repeated evaluation technique is proposed as a state-of-the-art tool not only for measuring current preferences but also to assist with predicting future appreciation of consumer designs.