Quantifying and Maximizing Aesthetic Preference

One of the greatest challenges in new product development is the creating of a product form that is attractive to an intended market audience. Just as choice-based conjoint has been successfully utilized to explore product features, we have developed methods that enable and support conjoint analysis to explore consumer preferences within a continuous parametric range of visual aesthetics (physical product forms). We apply our work to vehicle design, where our application can facilitate vehicle design by providing a time and cost efficient method to obtain market research on aesthetic preferences for vehicle design. In general, this methodology will allow product developers to incorporate rich preference feedback from the market about product form, where market preferences can be collected extremely early in the development of the product concept