Understanding the Voice of the Press. A KPI-driven Approach to Analyzing Press Requirements for Technology Development

Abstract

Automotive press reviews contain rich descriptions of vehicle behavior, yet their qualitative nature limits their use in human-factors engineering. This paper introduces a concise and reproducible method for converting press narratives into structured criteria relevant to vehicle development. The approach transforms unstructured journalistic text into actionable human-factors insights through a structured qualitative analysis process including systematic statement extraction, thematic coding, sentiment tagging, and expert validation. A curated sample of review articles from a single automotive publication forms the dataset. Each article is screened for evaluative statements describing aspects of drivability, user experience, comfort, handling, braking, acoustics, and related vehicle attributes. Extracted statements are coded by sentiment, discipline, and thematic content. This process yields a large pool of unique descriptive expressions, which are then clustered into coherent themes through iterative qualitative analysis. The themes form the foundation of discipline-specific criteria that capture how journalists describe vehicle qualities such as steering precision, ride comfort, interface usability, and perceived performance. Sentiment tagging highlights which attributes are often criticized, which are praised only when exceptional, and which draw balanced commentary. Although no quantitative results are reported, the method shows how press perceptions can reveal asymmetries in user expectations and areas of potential dissatisfaction. Expert workshops refine the criteria to ensure technical consistency and reduce coder bias. The method provides a scalable framework for integrating experiential press language into early-phase requirements engineering, benchmarking, and user-centered product development, offering human-factors practitioners a structured way to interpret the press voice and derive criteria that reflect real-world perceptions of vehicle performance.

Keywords: Automotive, KPI, Human-centered, Media

DOI: 10.54941/ahfe1007850