VISUAL CONJOINT – FROM DISCRETE TO CONTINUOUS

One goal of designers is to find what users most likely appreciate and translate that into successful product designs. Over the past 15 years, the efficacy of visual conjoint analysis as a means to assess the visual preference of users has been explored and has demonstrated immense potential for product development and aesthetic design. Visual conjoint started within marketing but was adopted by engineering design due to its ability to map visual product attributes to quantifiable mathematical representations. Conjoint studies initially presented only discrete verbal options, which severely limited types of feedback that designers could acquire. As conjoint evolved and was adopted by engineering design, it began to include discrete imagery with verbal representations. This provided more information without requiring more cognitive processing by respondents. Engineering design then realized the advantage of having purely visual conjoint studies in that mathematically represented images could contain immense amounts of information in simple representations. Continuous visual conjoint leverages imagery that represents mathematical models of continuously variable design attributes.