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Stylidis, Kostas; Dagman, Andreas; Almius, H

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If designers want to communicate quality aspects of the product, there is a need to bring these characteristics into the measurable space of perceived quality (PQ) attributes. To illustrate the solution for designers' dilemma of the "best design choice" in this study we applied the PQ attributes importance ranking (PQAIR) method, with the example of a bread toaster. We choose for evaluation three PQ attributes which can significantly influence visual quality of a product: Gap, Flush and Parallelism. We performed the experiment measuring subjective preferences over the toaster designs of two respondent's groups - "Designers" and "Customers." We used sequentially: (i) web-survey (still images); (ii) desktop system; and (iii) fully immersive head-mounted display system (Virtual Reality).

Consequently, we conducted a post-experiment survey regarding subjective preferences, related to the PQ communication channels that have been implemented during the study. Our results indicate advantages and drawbacks for each PQ communication method that we applied in this experiment and encourage further research in the area of products' perceived quality assessment

Keywords:

Perceived quality, Virtual reality, New product development, Robust design, Industrial design