Relevance to industry The integrated framework proposed in this paper can be readily deployed in companies and used at different stages of the design of products. Firstly,our methodology provides a frame for describing how a given products family is perceived by users,and for storing and up-dating these data. Secondly, the data can be used to specify target requirements for a new product by qualitative comparisons to existing products. Finally,emerging product concepts may be directly assessed with regards to the requirements in a simple qualitative and comparative way.International audienceProduct 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'' 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 assess. This paper presents a general approach to assess product semantics in a sound way. It is based on usability tests,and involves several classical methods in marketing and decision-making theory,as multidimensional scaling,semantic differential method,factor analysis,pairwise comparison and analytical hierarchy process. As a result, our integrated approach provides designers with a tool which helps understand and specify the semantic part of the need; it rates and ranks the new product prototypes according to their closeness to the specified ''ideal product'',and it underlines the particular semantic dimensions that should be improved. To illustrate our approach,we have performed usability tests and applied our methodology to the design of table glasses. For the sake of clarity,each stage of the methodology is presented in detail on this particular example

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To avoid failures in the marketplace, the control of the risks in product innovation and the reduction of the innovation cycles require fast and valid assessments from customers. An interactive genetic algorithm (IGA) is proposed for eliciting users' perceptions about the shape of a product, in order to stimulate creativity and to identify design trends. Interactive users' assessment tests are conducted on virtual products to capture and analyze users' responses. The IGA is interfaced with Computer Aided Design (CAD) software (CATIA V5) to create sets of parameterized designs in real time, which are presented iteratively by a graphical interface to the users for evaluation. After a description of the IGA, a study on the convergence of the IGA is presented. The convergence varies, according to the tuning parameters of the algorithm and the size of the design problem. An experiment was carried out with a set of 45 users on the application case, a dashboard, put forward by Renault. The implementation of the perceptive tests and the analysis of the results are described using hierarchical ascendant classification (HAC) and multivariate analysis. This paper shows how the results of tests using IGA can be used to elicit user perception and to detect design trends.