A hybrid consumer-oriented model for product affective design: An aspect of visual ergonomics

Crucial issues for product designers include how to capture consumers’ attention, evoke their pleasurable preferences, and affect their purchase decisions. In this article, we focus on consumers’ affective preferences in relation to visual ergonomics to propose a new hybrid consumer-oriented model using gray relational analysis (GRA), gray prediction (GP), and the technique for order preference by similarity to ideal solution (TOPSIS). The GRA is used to identify the most influential elements of the product form to help product designers focus their attention more on these elements without compromising the predictive performance. The GP is used in conjunction with the GRA to obtain a better structure for the hybrid consumer-oriented model, and TOPSIS is performed to determine the optimal alternatives for best matching consumers’ affective preferences. These experimental results show that the new hybrid consumer-oriented model incorporated with the CAD/CAM system can facilitate the product affective design process.