The effect of the designer’s approach on the perceived product quality: an exploratory case study of tangible products

Nowadays people tend to value attachment, meaning and experience more than owning even more products. This challenges designers to create products that incorporate more meaning and experience. These kind of products could create a better attachment between user and product, longer use of products and as a consequence less waste. Knowing which steps, methods and tools and other ‘components in the design process’ have an effect on the user experience of the product could help the designer to create such products through implementing these components more into their design process. This paper describes the study in which the correlations between the components of the design process and the user experience by means of three exploratory case studies. Positive correlations were found between the components in the design process and the perceived product quality for components of the categories ‘design shaping methods’, ‘ergonomic and functional study’ and the category ‘user involvement’.