A Research On Perception Characteristics Of Mobile Phone’s Form And Surface Material

As the development of science technology, individuated products become more and more popular. Consumer emphasizes the feeling property when they purchased goods as the developing of individuation requirement and product function. There is a misunderstanding between designer and consumer. How to identify consumer’s feeling preference property and conformity this property into products are still big problem for designers. Therefore, how to design products that meet consumers’satisfaction is a common problem for all the world’s manufacturers.There are more than one thousand different brands in mobile phone market. Consumers focus more on the appearance of phones during their purchasing process as the function diversity is not so strong now. Form and material are the two important parts of a product’s appearance. At the same time, groups of young have become the most important one of the mobile phone consumer groups. They like pursuit of fashion and personality, have distinct preferences, and emphasize a very high value on feeling of a product’s appearance. Therefore, this article chooses the group of young consumers as the object, and focus on form and material of the mobile phone to respectively establish the relationship model between consumers’preferences and the form factors, and the relationship model between consumers’preferences and the material factors.First, scale of assessment for mobile phones was built through the semantic differences, multi-dimensional scale analysis, cluster analysis, factor analysis methods. And then mobile phone form factor were selected. On this basis, the consumers’ preferences model and the model between feel characteristics and the form factors were built respectively, using the structural equation modeling (SEM) methods. These two types of structural equation modeling reflected the relations among image sense words, form factors and the overall preference. They can help designers to grasp the psychological reaction when the consumers chose products. On the surface material of mobile phone,3-d effect pictures of mobile phone material were drawn using the3Ds Max software and the image sense words on material were chosen. Then Correspondence Analysis was used to show the distribution of different materials on the scores of each image sense word. After that, Optimal Scaling Regression method was used to build the consumer preferences models. The model reflected the overall impact between the consumer preferences and image sense words under different materials conditions, and it will help designers to select material and improve the material design.The studies on form and material in this paper can objectively reflect consumers’ overall preferences on different form elements and material elements and expressed the relationship by quantitative methods. The results of this research can help designers grasp the consumers’real preferences in product design process, and it also provides the corresponding references for decision making of product design.