The 112th Installment
Language for Evaluating Design — Is "Unique Design" a Bad Thing?

by Hiroyuki Ikemoto,
Professor, Master Program of Innovation for Design and Engineering

AIIT's Master Program of Innovation for Design and Engineering develops designers who understand engineering and engineers who understand design. One technology for bringing design and engineering together is kansei (sensitivity) engineering. Positioning analysis and preference regression analysis, which are components of kansei engineering and which are used for design research, enable the quantitative assessment of design-related human sentiment and preferences.

In product design and positioning analysis, "perception maps" that visualize how consumers (customers) perceive product designs are created. Companies can use these maps to think about how to gain a competitive advantage over another company's product design.

Although there are numerous ways to create perception maps, the easiest to use are those that create a visual map of the correspondence between a product's exterior design and words expressing consumers' impression of the design (hereinafter "impression words"). In general, perception maps are achieved by conducting questionnaires or interviews to identify impression words that consumers use to describe products' exterior design, aggregating correspondence between design and impression words in a contingency table, and conducting correspondence analysis. Below are some examples of impression words used in positioning analysis for the exterior design of home electronics, televisions, and other such electrical devices for consumers.

Simple, muted, unique, classy, smart, fashionable, stylish, refined, neat, casual, fancy, cheap, will match home decor, seems easy to use, seems difficult to use, familiar, grown-up, seems performant, seems easy to clean and maintain, seems durable, seems like it will make housework fun, seems like I'll feel good just holding it, seems like it will impress others, seems like it will make me appear to have good taste.

Impression words, as shown by the above, convey consumers' impressions toward a product's design, toward functions and performance suggested by such design, and toward having or using the product. Phrases such as "seems like it will make housework fun," "seems like I'll feel good just holding it," "seems like it will impress others," and "seems like it will make me appear to have good taste" are impression words used when having or using products and are important particularly in user experience design.

In preference regression analysis, multiple regression analysis is done by gathering the data above as well as identifying consumers' preferences concerning exterior design. Product design preference is then translated into objective variables and product design impression words are translated into explanatory variables. Using a model that estimates preference based on the results of a multiple regression analysis, one can determine what impression words to emphasize in order to increase consumers' preference toward a product's exterior design and which words to de-emphasize. In other words, it allows one to ascertain what impression a design should give. For example, one can conduct multiple regression analysis using an objective variable for consumers' response to the impression word "seems like it will make me appear to have good taste" and explanatory variables for the other impression words. Doing this will allow for quantitatively expressing which design-related impressions are accounting for the reason why "seems like it will make me appear to have good taste."

Sampling and selecting impression words are the most important steps when determining the analysis success or failure of a positioning analysis or preference regression analysis. Impression word sampling often takes the form of interviewing consumers (product customers). This involves preparing visuals (photos or renderings) for the product design being researched and lining them up according to consumer preference. The consumer is then asked how their impressions differ between preferred designs and non-preferred designs. The evaluation grid method, or EGM, is helpful here.

EGM is an interview and analysis technique for clarifying people's cognitive structure to identify how people perceive things and how they consequently evaluate them. Originally an interview method proposed as a means to treat patients in clinical psychology (repertoire grid method), it has been adapted for product planning and other applications. Using EGM allows one to ascertain users' cognition structure as a hierarchical structure—to see what people are looking at, how they feel about it, and how much value they see it. To sample impression words that relate to a product's exterior design, interviews are conducted to identify people's different impressions between their preferred and non-preferred designs. These "ladder ring interviews" ask questions like "What is good about products with designs that give you that impression?" (ladder up) and "what about the design gives you that impression?" (ladder down) and allow for clarifying consumers' impressions, values, and points of focus concerning a design.

Impression word selection refers to choosing impression words to use in field surveys from among words sampled in preliminary research. One first eliminates impression words that do not really apply to any of multiple product designs used in the research, and then chooses a better word that fits a consumer's impression of a product's design from impression words with similar meanings (e.g., "fresh" and "new"). When selecting an impression word such as "grown-up," there is a tendency to want to use the antonym, "childlike." However, one should not use "childlike" for an impression word if it did not come up when impression words were sampled.

As impression words are constantly changing due to customers, products, designs, markets, culture, or new generations, they must be continually updated. After conducting a survey using impression words, one should remove words that customers did not respond with and re-examine whether consumers might actually mean something else with the impression words they chose. For example, one should be careful with words like "simple" and "unique."

As an impression word, "simple" is often used in design research for a variety of products and frequently means "plain" and "unornamented." When doing design research for flip phones, I encountered a demographic of consumers who did not use the word "simple" to mean "plain" and "unornamented." When I asked them what they thought the opposite of "simple" was, the vast majority said "not flashy."

"Unique" is a commonly-chosen impression word that expresses the idea of being different from other things. Something I have discovered in my extensive design research is that, in Japan, "unique" with respect to design is more often seen as a negative than a positive. Semantically, it is very close to terms like "one-of-a-kind," "eccentric," and "strange." Some impression words that mean "different from other things" are "has individuality" or "has originality."

Maybe it's not something to be happy about when someone calls you a "unique person."