Why this is interesting: perceived quality and customer acceptance of new ideas have often been judged on gut feet and qualitative research. Intended Future brings quantitative rigour to the space.

Over the past few months, I've been collaborating with Intended Future, a Swedish startup that's revolutionising our ability to understand customers' design preferences and their perception of quality.

Combining sophisticated quantitative research and data analysis with deep expertise in craftsmanship and automotive design, the team at Intended Future helps product planning, design, engineering and perceived quality teams focus on what really matters to customers. This saves cost, time, and effort throughout the planning, design, and development process.

But before we get in to how they achieve that, I want to explore a bit of the why: why getting perceived quality right is important, and why it's important to me.

The backstory

Lisbon, 2011.

I'm riding with a colleague in the back of a Mercedes W124 taxi, probably a 200 D. That most taxi of European taxis. We were heading for the airport, heading home. Another round of research fieldwork coming to an end.

I craned over the driver's shoulder to see how many kilometres the old Merc had done: 576,832. A respectable number.

I poked and prodded around the rear seats and doors looking for signs of the wear and tear that might come with that kind of distance, to see how this humble 200 D might be coming apart at the seams, thanks to the tens of thousands who had temporarily worn it. But there were none.

Sure, the door handles were a little grubby, and the carpets somewhat less than beige, but back there in the back seat, over the lumps and bumps of indifferent Portuguese roads, this thing was still a paragon of quiet comfort and quality. It was a rolling testament to a pursuit of excellence at Mercedes-Benz. The driver, in his 60s, said he never wanted to drive anything else. He'd die in this car, he said, happily.

Ever since that day, I've had the same little ritual when I get in to the back seat of a cab. I poke and I prod for signs of how a product came together and how it's fairing with extreme use. And because most design effort is expended on making sure the front half of the interior is the most attractive, convincing the driver that *this* is the car for them, I look at how design and manufacturing is changing in that slightly less important but no less revealing domain of the second row.

The present day

Gothenburg, 2022.

I'm riding in the back of a Skoda Enyak, an electric SUV built on Volkswagen's MEB platform. I'm heading to a meeting to talk about the future of design strategy. Scratchy plastics are everywhere, each solid surface failing the tok-tok test as my knuckle collided with an unyielding, resonant hardness.

Once upon a time, Skodas shared solid metal door handles with other Volkswagen Group products. They were cool to the touch and pinged sweetly when flicked with a fingernail. In a car priced for value, these glints of chrome made it feel a little bit special and far from cheap. Those days are gone: the thin veneer of metal paint on the Enyak's handles wouldn't fool anyone. In this grim, black hole of a back seat, there was no love, no joy.

It all makes sense, of course. EVs are expensive to make and to bring them to market as cheaply as possible, manufacturers are stripping out cost wherever they can. But what to strip, and where? When Chinese manufacturers are investing just as much in the second row experience, does it make sense to create a black hole of plastic back there? And what should remain or, even, be emphasised to ensure a better-than-joyless experience?

Focussing on the wrong thing

It's a critical question facing OEMs, particularly as many step back from low-margin, high volume ambitions to focus on selling fewer products at a higher premium.

Get it right, and you manage to effectively balance cost and customer perception, improving profitability and burnishing your brands reputation.

Get it wrong, however, and you face a fiasco like Volkswagen's.

In a move likely focussed on reducing the cost of the MEB platform, Volkswagen removed buttons from its entertainment and climate control systems, replacing them with unilluminated touch strips. These are impossible to see in the dark, much less feel when driving. They are, in short, a user experience nightmare.

Unsurprisingly, this move has infuriated customers and caused no end of ridicule in the press. Chastened, Volkswagen's CEO has said that, once again, buttons will grace their dashboards and steering wheels. The company has also established a Customer Focus Board Committee to make sure these kinds of mistakes don't happen again.

One would have thought that understanding customers' preferences before you take away their buttons might have been a good idea. But what Volkswagen's experience shows is that the process of prioritisation, as it is in many manufacturers, is driven less by what customers really value, and more by arguments between accountants, product planners, designers, perceived quality experts, and engineers.

So, what to do?

Focus on the right thing

In the face of accountants' cold, hard arguments about cold, hard cash, talking about customer needs and preferences can be perceived a little wishy-washy, even if the reality of robust qualitative data is anything but.

But gathering the kind of robust quantitative data that can sway these arguments about what matters to customers has always been a challenge. This is especially true when the product idea in question is still a sketch on the page or a render on the screen. How can we reliably understand customers' reactions to something they've never seen or experienced?

Drawing on 10 years of research at Chalmers University in Gothenburg, the team at Intended Future have cracked this conundrum. They can tell you-reliably, repeatably, and with statistical validity-:

which aspects of perceived quality and design quality, and which features and functions matter most to customers,
where in and around the car they take their cues for perceived quality,
and how these factors differ across demographic cohorts and geographies, like China, Germany, and the United States

The Intended Future offer

The Perceived Quality Index

Intended Future's Perceived Quality Index (PQI) helps engineers, perceived quality, and craftsmanship leaders understand precisely where current products are not meeting, meeting, or exceeding customers expectations. This opens up the opportunity for cost reduction without compromising customers' expectations during mid-cycle updates, for example.

The PQI also offers a robust way to compare products across manufacturers. A total score allows overall vehicle perceived quality to be compared, while sub scores enable specific areas to be compared, such as seats, instrument panel, and front and rear facias.

The Customer Acceptance Index

The Customer Acceptance Index (CAI) helps product strategy, design and engineering teams optimise portfolio composition and product definition during the early design and development phases.

Want to know the minimum viable number of model variants that will be acceptable in the Chinese market? Intended Future can tell you.

Or want to know whether a radical approach to redesigning the rear seat experience will be appealing to American consumers? It's the perfect question to ask of the Customer Acceptance Index.

By using the CAI during the early stages of vehicle development, teams can ensure that they hit customers' expectations precisely, with no overspend on things they don't value.

Wrapping up

Me, back in the day, capturing images for a design benchmarking database

My career started in design benchmarking, offering OEMs thousands of images of each new car that came to market. The ideas was for designer's to draw their own conclusions about what mattered to customers based on what other manufacturers were doing.

Intended Future removes that bias and broadens our perspective on what matters, connecting designers and their colleagues to the truth of customer preference, as revealed by customers themselves.

It's an approach I'm genuinely excited by, because with this insight, product planners, designers and engineers can create products that more precisely meet customers expectations while saving time, effort, and cost.

If you'd like to learn more about Intended Future and how the team can help your design process become data-informed, drop me a message and let's have a chat!