Perceived quality of products: a framework and attributes ranking method

Abstract

Perceived quality is one of the most critical aspects of product development that defines the successful design. This paper presents a new approach to perceived quality assessment by examining its elements, decomposed into a structure with the bottom-up sensory approach from the level of basic ('ground') attributes, covering almost every aspect of quality perception from the engineering viewpoint. The paper proposes a novel method for perceived quality attributes relative importance ranking, resulting in the balanced perceived quality of the final product within the given conditions. The proposed method helps to reach the equilibrium of the product's quality equation from the perspective of design effort, time, and costs estimations. The authors introduce the Perceived Quality Framework (PQF), which is the taxonomy system for perceived quality attributes and the core of the attributes importance ranking (PQAIR) method. The research outcomes are based on findings of the qualitative exploratory study, including European and North American premium and luxury automotive manufacturers. An empirical structural validity test was performed to assess the usability and rigour of the proposed method. The results indicate that perceived quality evaluation can be significantly improved during all stages of product development.

The Influence of Xenocentrism on Purchase Intentions of the Consumer: The Mediating Role of Product Attitudes

“…Perceived quality is a multidimensional entity, a result of the convention between producer and consumer, and can be seen differently by different research schools of thought [24]. In the marketing context, perceived quality refers to how a consumer interprets the general quality of a product or service and the way he/she chooses this good instead of some alternative [25].…”

Design margins in industrial practice

“…Some properties of the product are difficult to quantify, in particular those associated with subjective product features, such as some aspects of driver comfort, which contributes to the requirements on the suspension system. These issues are dealt with specifically in the research on perceived quality (e.g., Stylidis et al 2019), however in the case study. In these cases, the feature engineers, like E3, may set generous requirements to be sure a feature will be at an appropriate level, once the conflicting requirements on the components that contribute to the feature are met.…”

A review on quality from the perspective of industrial product design assessment

“…The perception of quality is related to the customer experience with the product performance [17], and is not to be neglected the fact that the perceived quality may also be affected by the quality of the products' attributes themselves, especially the surface finish that is strongly related to perceived quality. Approached from a sensory perspective, the perceived quality of a product takes into account the relation between user and product attributes as visual (referring to visual harmony that derives from general pattern or colour associations), auditory (the auditory reaction having a great importance in relation to the perceived quality of a product), tactile (reaction related to touch and feel) and olfactory (most often related to the material) [18].…”