Bridging The Gap From User Research To Design Positioning

In the current societies, the consumable markets have already shifted from manufacture oriented to consumption oriented; and consumers pay more and more attention to the expression of immanency than the sole function of products. It can be concluded that on the trend of function assimilation, the products that have the similar styles to consumers' personalities, life styles and even value concepts will cause more attention and raise more resonance of the consumers. In a word, consumers' mental index will cast a more and more important impact on our design work.In the field of marketing, some scholars have already used some consumers' metal factors such as personality and lifestyle to make market segmentation and positioning. But their work has little direct guidance to design work. Based on this situation, the consumers are thoroughly studied from the designers' point of view in this paper. The two main factors, personality and lifestyle of consumers, are investigated in terms of the effect on their selections of products. Useful approaches have also been found to link the user research to design positioning, which will give much support and guidance to the work of designers. The main work of this paper can be concluded as below:Life style and personality are chosen as two main factors to investigate the consumers from the designers' point of view. Adaptive user research methods are summarized according to requirements of design work.After theoretical analysis and investigative reasoning, the correlation between the personality of consumers and their preference to different styles of design is found and an assumption about design positioning according to personality of consumers is brought forward. This assumption closely follows the tendency of paying more attention to the metal index of consumers in the field of marketing, tells the new application value of metal index of our consumers in design field, broadens our sight in design positioning and bridges user research and design positioning. On the basis of the above conclusion, a large amount of product data are collected, filed, analyzed and summed up. A "descriptive model of product design styles" is built, which divides the products (the majority of them are electric consumptive products) into nine types, and a lot of vivid descriptions and photos are used to make the model perspicuous. Enterprises and designers can get more appropriate design position on the support of this model. And this model can also be used to analyze the present design styles of products and forecast of their development tendency.