Abstract

This paper is a significant contribution to the field of motorbike design research in India as it quantitatively establishes and reveals a long kept design secret that the fuel tank is the most important component in the visual perception of a motorbike. The findings are based on eye tracking based experiments conducted with 20 subjects using 30 motorbike images as stimuli. The paper also illustrates how motorbike designers vary the fuel tank forms, colours and graphics to differentiate motorbikes belonging to different biking segments. The eye tracking experiments described in this paper give directions for further research to systematically assess and ascertain the visual perception and customer behavior towards products, which has always been left to subjective assessment and interpretation in the past.