New Products: What Separates Winners from Losers?

The physical form or design of a product is an unquestioned determinant of its marketplace success. A good design attracts consumers to a product, communicates to them, and adds value to the produc...

https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/1252116.pdf

Seeking the Ideal Form: Product Design and Consumer Response:

Despite its centrality to human thought and practice, aesthetics has for the most part played a petty role in human-computer interaction research. Increasingly, however, researchers attempt to strike a balance between the traditional concerns of human-computer interaction and considerations of aesthetics. Thus, recent research suggests that the visual aesthetics of computer interfaces is a strong determinant of users' satisfaction and pleasure. However, the lack of appropriate concepts and measures of aesthetics may severely constraint future research in this area. To address this issue, we conducted four studies in order to develop a measurement instrument of perceived web site aesthetics. Using exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses we found that users' perceptions consist of two main dimensions, which we termed "classical aesthetics" and "expressive aesthetics". The classical aesthetics dimension pertains to aesthetic notions that presided from antiquity until the 18th century. These notions emphasize orderly and clear design and are closely related to many of the design rules advocated by usability experts. The expressive aesthetics dimension is manifested by the designers' creativity and originality and by the ability to break design conventions. While both dimensions of perceived aesthetic are drawn from a pool of aesthetic judgments, they are clearly distinguishable from each other. Each of the aesthetic dimensions is measured by a five-item scale. The reliabilities, factor structure and validity tests indicate that these items reflect the two perceived aesthetics dimensions adequately.

Assessing dimensions of perceived visual aesthetics of web sites

Thin-film electronics in its myriad forms has underpinned much of the technological innovation in the fields of displays, sensors, and energy conversion over the past four decades. This technology also forms the basis of flexible electronics. Here we review the current status of flexible electronics and attempt to predict the future promise of these pervading technologies in healthcare, environmental monitoring, displays and human-machine interactivity, energy conversion, management and storage, and communication and wireless networks.

Flexible Electronics: The Next Ubiquitous Platform

The Different Roles of Product Appearance in Consumer Choice

Design is a potent strategic tool that companies can use to gain a sustainable competitive advantage. Yet most companies neglect design as a strategy tool. What they don't realize is that good design can enhance products, environment, communications, and corporate identity.

G. Alexander Rath

Papers

Design: a powerful but neglected strategic tool