Perceived quality is one of the most critical aspects of product development that defines the successful design. This paper presents a new approach to perceived quality assessment by examining its elements, decomposed into a structure with the bottom-up sensory approach from the level of basic (‘ground’) attributes, covering almost every aspect of quality perception from the engineering viewpoint. The paper proposes a novel method for perceived quality attributes relative importance ranking, resulting in the balanced perceived quality of the final product within the given conditions. The proposed method helps to reach the equilibrium of the product’s quality equation from the perspective of design effort, time, and costs estimations. The authors introduce the Perceived Quality Framework (PQF), which is the taxonomy system for perceived quality attributes and the core of the attributes importance ranking (PQAIR) method. The research outcomes are based on findings of the qualitative exploratory study, including European and North American premium and luxury automotive manufacturers. An empirical structural validity test was performed to assess the usability and rigour of the proposed method. The results indicate that perceived quality evaluation can be significantly improved during all stages of product development. Abbreviations: PQF: Perceived Quality Framework; PQAIR: Perceived Quality Attributes Importance Ranking; TPQ: Technical Perceived Quality; VPQ: Value-based Perceived Quality; OEM: Original Equipment Manufacturer.

Perceived quality is one of the most important factors underlying success of car manufacturers today. There is a significant amount of literature regarding perceived quality from a marketing research perspective, applied psychology and consumer research. From an engineering viewpoint, perceived quality is represented in the literature mainly by the work that assesses different aspects of perceived quality in order to evaluate them in the early design stages. As a result of this no theoretical framework has yet been compiled that combines customer view on perceived quality and the engineering prospects of this broad term. Consequently, terms regarding perceived quality components and elements often have multiple meanings or meanings similar to each other. There is a need to standardize the terminology and definitions related to perceived quality more concretely. This paper presents the basis of a theoretical framework in an attempt to build a model, including different aspects of perceived quality regarding automotive industry needs. Based on the literature review and industry examples, the authors propose a common terminology and perceived quality definition in the field of the automotive industry

At the early stages of the product development, it is important to set up customer's requirements and translate these into the technical specifications with the highest level of precision since the changes in the late design phases have extremely high cost. These requirements are directly dependent on the correct and complete definition of perceived quality attributes. Such attention to the details is vital for the luxury car manufacturers since they are seeking to fulfill customer requirements with the high level of personalization. This research based on the perceived quality framework and presents findings from the empirical study of leading Italian luxury vehicle manufacturers. This research contributes to the existing debate regarding the correct definition of the customer's requirements and communication strategies. Moreover, it highlights possible ways to reduce information asymmetry between car manufacturers and customers

Core values are an important part of Volvo Car Group's and Volvo Group Truck Technology's strategic development plans. Both of these companies share the same three core values: Quality, Safety and Environmental Care, but they approach these values in different ways due to different customer demands. This study seeks to understand how industry professionals and customers perceive these core values and the attributes that are associated with them, using semi-structured interviews with industry professionals from both companies and quantitative survey methods with customers. The purposes of this study are to investigate how designers convey core values to customers through product attributes and how customers perceive those core values through the same attributes. Such an understanding can contribute to more effective design processes that communicate company values in the early product development phases

If designers want to communicate quality aspects of the product, there is a need to bring these characteristics into the measurable space of perceived quality (PQ) attributes. To illustrate the solution for designers' dilemma of the “best design choice” in this study we applied the PQ attributes importance ranking (PQAIR) method, with the example of a bread toaster. We choose for evaluation three PQ attributes which can significantly influence visual quality of a product: Gap, Flush and Parallelism. We performed the experiment measuring subjective preferences over the toaster designs of two respondent's groups - “Designers” and “Customers.” We used sequentially: (i) web-survey (still images); (ii) desktop system; and (iii) fully immersive head-mounted display system (Virtual Reality).Consequently, we conducted a post-experiment survey regarding subjective preferences, related to the PQ communication channels that have been implemented during the study. Our results indicate advantages and drawbacks for each PQ communication method that we applied in this experiment and encourage further research in the area of products' perceived quality assessment