Newer is better! The influence of a novel appearance on the perceived performance quality of products

Abstract

Understanding how consumers perceive products based on their appearance is of great importance to designers. In this article, we explore the level of novelty of a product appearance as a general design guideline to evoke positive associations about the product's performance quality. Novelty implies the deviation in a product appearance from the current design state. Based on the literature, we theorise that consumers associate products with a novel appearance with technological advancement and thus with a greater performance quality. Data from two studies in which participants were asked to evaluate washing machines and single-lens reflex cameras support our expectations that the level of novelty of a product appearance positively affects the perceived performance quality of the product.

Keywords:

• aesthetics
• quality issues
• user evaluation
• design guidelines
• product perception

Acknowledgements

The authors thank three anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments and suggestions. Furthermore, we would like to thank Janneke Blijlevens and Deniz Popov for their help in creating the stimuli. This research was supported by grant number 11129 of the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO) awarded to Ruth Mugge.

Notes

We acknowledge that industrial design is an integrated activity, which involves more than just the exterior product appearance. However, the present research takes a consumer's perspective and aims to understand how consumers form impressions about products at purchase based on their exterior product appearance. Accordingly, the other elements of industrial design are beyond the scope of this article.

All variations in degrees of freedom in statistical tests reported throughout the analyses are due to occasional missing values.