Easy and Flexible Specifications and Product Evaluations by Expert and Customer Comparisons With Existing Products

As soon as the products to design must not only deliver pure services but have also to exhibit esteem or subjective functions such as aesthetics, style, cultural values and ergonomic considerations, both individual and group product evaluations as welle as product specification are problematic. Indeed, for both design tasks, designers must qualify the expected properties of a product and find relevant measurement scales to quantify them. in this paper, we propose a design method named COMPARE for understanding the perception of existing products (before strating the creation process), for defining the specifications for a new product and, finally, for evaluating the emerging design concepts under the expected properties (perceptual attributes). the originality of this method is to be based on elementary and qualitative Pairwise Comparisons of products under given perceptual attributes (and also further Principal Component analysis). il results in two fundamental properties of user-friendliness for the designer and easiness for automatically generate measurement scales under perceptual attributes. Teh COMPARE method has been experiemnted on the analysis and the design of automotive dashboards.