Agile and reliable design decisions based on the perception of the target audience

The conceptualization phase of a product plays a critical role in the design process. The decisions made during this phase directly affect the degree of innovation, quality of design solutions, costs involved, and overall competitiveness of the product. During this phase, a continuous process of accepting and rejecting options takes place, so that making decisions correctly becomes a very important activity for the company. However, decisions made during this phase often rely on subjective opinions, leading to uncertainty and errors. This paper presents the Waumap platform (https://waumap.ibv.org), that was developed as a methodological tool to involve potential consumers in the design process. This tool takes advantage of the potential of Artificial Intelligence (AI) to analyze in a standardized, agile and autonomous way the perception of the consumer expressed naturally by a representative sample of remote users, combining classical qualitative user research with natural language processing techniques.The paper shows also the results of the use cases carried out with different companies. In general, the companies state that the Waumap tool is very simple, intuitive and agile. They consider it very useful for their decision-making in their development processes, specifically, in the following application areas: new product concepts, supermarket shelf (physical and/or virtual), packaging and corporate image.The analysis of the perception of the consumers who have participated in the use cases have allowed to show that the automatic analysis of the user's perception through Artificial Intelligence reduces the time and effort of analysis to generate the keys that make it easier for companies to make decisions in the design of their products. The Waumap platform has positive implications for the decision-making process, facilitating a better integration of the target audience in the product conceptualization phase and offering the keys to design optimization from the point of view of market acceptance.