HOW TO COMPREHEND AND ASSESS PRODUCT SEMANTICS - A PROPOSAL FOR AN INTEGRATED METHODOLOGY

Product semantics, the “study of the symbolic qualities of man-made forms in the context of their use, and application of this knowledge to industrial design” [1] is an important challenge in product design. Because of subjectivity, this particular dimension of the user’s need is difficult to express, to quantify and to evaluate. This paper presents a general approach to assess product semantics in a solid way. It is based on users’ tests, and involves several classical methods in marketing and decision theory, as multidimensional scaling, semantic differential method, factor analysis, pairwise comparison and Analytical Hierarchy Process. As result, our approach provides designers with a tool which helps the definition of the semantic part of the need, it rates and ranks the new product prototypes according to their proximity to the “ideal product”, and it underlines the particular semantic dimensions that could be improved. To illustrate our approach, we have performed users’ tests and applied our methodology to the design of table glasses. For clarity, each stage of the methodology is presented in detail on this particular example.