Means for measuring people's preferences for visual wood with aid of Internet

It is of interest to study and analyse the consumer market for visual wood so as to produce the right "look" of wood to the right product and the right group of customer. The choice of wood quality to a certain product is often decided at the production site without good information of people's sensitivity (taste profiles) for different blending of wood features. Today, regarding the issue of wood quality, there are no established techniques for detecting people's taste profiles.The aim of the work has been to develop a method for preference studies where visible wood is in focus. The aim was also to present interview results showing differences in acceptance among interviewed people just to persuade the readers about the usability of the methodology.In this investigation only wood floors of parquet type have been examined. Only one room type has been used. The interior was changed over time to study possible affect on parquet flooring preferences. About 50 persons participated in the study and they answered three times each during the development process.The interview concept is interactive and self instructive to measure preferences of different appearances of wood (in this study floor). The same room is shown but with different wood flooring and the floors is ranked with aid of paired comparison. When the ranking is completed, questions with both open and given answer alternatives are asked, just to get a description of the cause of preferences.Principal Component Analysis together with simple statistics was used to envisage the reader about the usability of the method. Perhaps the most important results of the research is that it is possible to measure what people prefer and to a certain extent why. Groups of peoples with different taste profiles can be found even if the number of interviewed people was small. The different wood species was described in words of the interviewed people, which of course from a wood producing company view, can be valuable in a market communication situation.Godkänd; 2006; 20070501 (ysko