Pragmatic Needs-Oriented Evaluation of Visibility, Impressions, Aesthetics and Eye Movement for Platform Display Design

In today’s strict business environments, one key success factor for a platform display company seems to be making a product be different from those sold by other competing companies. The differentiator should be not only a functional one such as visibility, but also symbolic/experiential one such as impressions/aesthetics perceived. Considering this, effective/efficient evaluations of visibility, impressions and aesthetics that can be performed rapidly and easily are required. The objective of the present paper is to develop a pragmatic needs-oriented evaluation method to examine platform displays’ visibility, impressions and aesthetics, which is scientifically rigorous yet also very simple and time-saving, and therefore acceptable for practitioners. By breaking down the needs of a company’s need, multiple dimensions of evaluations were elicited. By performing a series of experiments, the multiple dimensional evaluations of visibility, impressions and aesthetics of a new product as well as its competing products were carried out. Results of each dimension as well as feasibility of the analysis procedure are discussed.