Consumer goods

Abstract

Product design and development (PDD) has shifted its focus from addressing functional and technological issues to user-centric and consumer-oriented concerns in recent years. More specifically, the experiential aspect of design has taken a crucial role in creating more consumer-focused products. Often, customer research or user-involvement studies are conducted to explore necessary knowledge and gain an insight into user experience. Unlike functional requirements, experiential customer requirements are usually more tacit, latent and complex. As such, the issues concerning user experience exploration in consumer goods design deserve more attention. These will be the focus of this chapter. In this regard, a prototype context-based multi-sensory experience system (CMSES) with a scenario co-build strategy (SCS) is proposed to facilitate user experience exploration in designing consumer goods. A three-stage case study is employed to illustrate the proposed prototype system. Potential of the proposed approach in the context of concurrent engineering (CE) and collaborative product development (CPD) is discussed.