Quality during Design
Quality during Design is a podcast for product designers, engineers, and anyone else who cares about creating high-quality products. In each episode, we explore the principles of quality design, from user-centered thinking to iterative development. We introduce frameworks to make better design decisions and reduce costly re-designs. We explore ways to co-work with cross-functional teams. We also talk to experts in the field about their experiences and insights.
Join host Dianna Deeney in using quality thinking throughout the design process to create products others love, for less. Whether you're a seasoned designer or just starting out, looking to improve your existing designs or start from scratch, Quality during Design is the podcast for you.
Quality during Design
Prioritizing Customer Satisfaction in Product Design (the Kano Model)
How do you balance customer wants with project constraints? If your customer-facing teammates are saying our customers want this, that and the other thing, which ones do we prioritize over others?
Not all features are equal in the eyes of our customers. And not all features are value-added, either.
In this episode, we delve into how to prioritize customer wants using the powerful Kano Model, a tool that maps customer satisfaction against the implementation of product features.
You'll learn how to differentiate between essential and non-essential features, ensuring that your design truly resonates with your customers. This episode walks through the intricacies of the Kano Model's two-by-two matrix and the different satisfaction levels represented by various lines and curves.
Too complex? We break it down. Prioritize your features based on their impact to the customer using their voice. Then, consider how well you want to implement that in your design using the Kano Model.
Get ready for practical tips and proven strategies to enhance your product’s value while managing cost, time, and design trade-offs. This episode is an introduction to the Kano Model for design.
Visit the podcast blog for a Kano Model and examples to help you put it into practice.
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About me
Dianna Deeney helps product designers work with their cross-functional team to reduce concept design time and increase product success, using quality and reliability methods.
She consults with businesses to incorporate quality within their product development processes. She also coaches individuals in using Quality during Design for their projects.
She founded Quality during Design through her company Deeney Enterprises, LLC. Her vision is a world of products that are easy to use, dependable, and safe – possible by using Quality during Design engineering and product development.
You're in a great situation. You just got invited to be a participant in new product development. It's a new project. You're still developing design inputs and gathering them. When you're talking with your customer, facing teammates, this could be marketing or sales or field ops when you're talking with them, they are giving you a lot of customer wants and some may also be categorized as needs, but basically they're saying our customers want this and they want that and they really want this thing. Well, these may all be important to the customers, but are they all equally important? Let's talk about how to prioritize these customer wants for design after this brief introduction.
Speaker 1:Hello and welcome to Quality During Design, the place to use quality thinking to create products others love for less. I'm your host, diana Deeney. I'm a senior level quality professional and engineer with over 20 years of experience in manufacturing and design. I consult with businesses and coach individuals and how to apply quality during design to their processes. Listen in and then join us. Visit qualityduringdesigncom.
Speaker 1:So you are in the early phases of a development project and you're getting a lot of customer wants. They want this, that and the other thing, and we do want to try to provide our customers what they want. We also know that we're going to have to balance those wants against other limitations of the project, be it cost. Maybe the customers want something, but the cost to implement that or just the cost to make that available is prohibitive. We could also be looking at some time constraints, because there is a time to market consideration and then there are also other trade-off decisions that we need to make in our design. If we give our customers this thing, then we may not be able to give them the other thing because they conflict. We can't do the same thing. We have to choose one or the other. So how do we prioritize all of these kind of wants? We can prioritize them based on a level of customer satisfaction associated with any particular feature of the design that we're considering. I like to think of it as if we are assigning a specific severity rating to a potential risk, but instead we are assigning a customer satisfaction rating to a potential benefit. And one of the great things about using quality tools is somebody's already done that and we can borrow something that someone's already done, that other people have had success with, and apply it to our own projects to prioritize the customer wants and benefits of our concept design the quality tool that I'm talking about is called a Kano model.
Speaker 1:It's named after Dr Noriaki Kano and he introduced it in 1984. So we are celebrating the 40th year anniversary of the Kano model. What the Kano model does is it relates customer satisfaction with a level of implementation of particular features. It is a special type of two by two chart. On the y-axis is customer satisfaction, on the y-axis is customer satisfaction. The higher the y-axis you go, the more satisfied the customer is. On the x-axis is level of implementation, and the better that you implement this particular feature into your product design, the farther along we are on the x-axis, on the positive side, when our customer-facing teammates are saying our customers want this. The Kano model provides an area where we can plot that particular feature request against how much our customers are going to be satisfied if they have it and how well we want to implement it. But that's not the only thing that it does I mentioned.
Speaker 1:The Kano model is a special two by two matrix because it's not blank. Depending where you look up Kano model, you'll find anywhere from three to five different categories of customer satisfaction to implementation relationships. These are lines or curves on this two by two matrix. Now why would we want to add these kind of lines or sections? Dr Kano wanted to demonstrate that not all features of a product are equal in the eyes of the customer and that not all features that are provided are actually value added. Some retract from the value in the customer's eyes.
Speaker 1:When I use a Kano model, I use five different lines in the two by two matrix. Two of them are positive, two are in the middle and one of them is a negative. So let's get the negative one out of the way. It's a reverse attribute. This line is really on here just to represent that sometimes we provide features or need to have or develop features in our product that our customers really don't like. When we hear our teammates say things like our customers have problems with this feature or they have difficulty using this particular feature of our product, that could be attributed as a reverse feature.
Speaker 1:This is something that we have in our product that our customers don't like and it may actually detract from them buying and using our product. So we don't want to use these. This reverse line is crashing down into the bottom right of our two by two chart. We just want to design these out, if we can. Almost mirror image to the reverse is a line that quickly goes up to the upper right of our two by two matrix and that is attractive. Those are the things that customers didn't expect, that are really delightful, are a surprise for them to use. These are attractive features because if we have a couple of these, it might be a deciding factor for if they want to purchase and use our product. In between these two is a one-dimensional. It tracks diagonally through our chart. The more we have of this feature, this one-dimensional feature, the more our customers are going to be satisfied, the more they're going to like it.
Speaker 1:There are two more lines on this Kano chart that I use. One is neutral If it's not really providing any kind of value, if it's just kind of there. But it needs to be there and our customers don't really care if it's there or not. It's neutral. But our last line is a little more tricky. This one is the must be. These are the things our customers expect to have minimally in whatever it is that they're buying or using. If we do a bad job at implementing this, if it's not done at all, our customers are really dissatisfied and they're not going to want to use it. But our line curves up and tracks along the x-axis. So even if we implement it a little bit, our customers will be satisfied. But they will never be ecstatic or excited about our product with our must-be features. Unless you've used the Kano model before, it can seem a little bit overwhelming. I introduced the Kano model during one of my presentations at the Reliability, maintainability and Managing Risk Conference in Pittsburgh. After my presentation there was questions and discussion and another attendee offered an example that helped clarify it for a lot of people. So let me share that example with you.
Speaker 1:When we are shopping around, sometimes the products that we're choosing between have different levels that we can buy into. Think of the internet, tv and phone plan that you may have at home, or your cellular plan or even a software plan that you want to buy into. There's usually a table that lists a basic plan, a plus plan and then a super plus plan, and underneath that are all the features that you get with those different plans. The basic plan has a few of the features checked, the basic plus has a few more and then the super duper Uber option has all the checkboxes checked. It includes all the features and all the things. That feature table is like the KANA model applied in principle, we don't have to offer our customers three different options or more than three different options if we don't want to. Maybe we just have one that we're offering them.
Speaker 1:The Kano model will help us to prioritize the customer wants and then also help us to determine how well we want to implement that into our product design. How do we apply this when we're talking with our teammates and they're giving us a list of wants? Because that's the ultimate goal. We want to be able to prioritize these customer wants and potential benefits so that we can make design decisions. We can set up the different categories of the KANA model like we do a severity rating scale, except we're going to label different categories from 1 to 5. 1 is reverse, 2 is neutral, 3 is must be, 4 is one-dimensional and 5 is attractive. The numbers don't really mean anything other than just a quick visual reference and comparison for prioritization. If our teammates give us five different customer wants, they want all of these things. We may not be able to provide them all, so let's dig a little bit deeper and take it to the next step.
Speaker 1:If we provide this feature for the customer, what kind of impact will it have on them. If they want this feature and they get it, what are they going to say about it? If they say I expect this, this must be as a minimum. If it's done badly, I tolerate it, but I'm dissatisfied, then this would be a three, a must be type of feature. Now, say, with another feature, our customers would say something different. They would say I want this, the more of it, or the better I get it, the more satisfied I am. Then we would rate that as a four, a one-dimensional type of feature, where that feature has a direct relationship to the level of customer satisfaction. If our teammates are saying our customers really want this, they're saying they want this or they use this other product and they think that's really neat and if we provide it here, we think they'll really like it. Maybe we would associate that with customer statements like I'm delighted or excited, I didn't even know I wanted this, or that this was possible Then that could be rated as a five, an attractive kind of feature.
Speaker 1:So now already, just with these three examples we have one of each we have a must be a one-dimensional and an attractive feature that our teammates are asking to incorporate into this design. Now, knowing this, categorizing these requests. In this way we can think about the different lines that they're associated with on the two-by-two KANA model With the must-be input. These inputs can correspond with things that are critical to quality. So it has to be an outcome of the design, but maybe it doesn't need to be fully implemented, or the best we can discuss with our team. What level of implementation do we really need to satisfy our customers? Where along the Kano model's x-axis would the must-have line level off? Then we can weigh the efforts and the cost to make it fully functional against the level needed to satisfy the customer.
Speaker 1:With a feature request that was one-dimensional or rating a four, this design input can correspond with something that's critical to satisfaction. We want the design to have these features and the more or the better the features are implemented, the more satisfied our customers are going to be. With these one-dimensional features, we can consider how can we best implement this feature in our design. If the better we can do it, how good can we do it and how will that affect our customer satisfaction? For the request that's associated with an attractive feature. These are design inputs that correspond with things that are critical to motivation. This feature can differentiate your design from the rest of the market. We want to explore ways that we can implement and enhance these features when we use the Kano model to think about customer wants in this way to be able to prioritize them. We can see that increasing the must-be features doesn't really help us differentiate ourselves from competitor products and we know that one-dimensional features have a direct impact on customer satisfaction and the attractive qualities can really set ourselves apart from the competition.
Speaker 1:As a consumer yourself, you'll recognize that there are temporal dynamics in the condo model. Things aren't static. What was once attractive or exciting can just become a must-be. Think about the evolution of the cell phone between BlackBerrys and the touchscreen. At one point the touchscreen was really attractive and exciting, but now it no longer is. It's just an accepted must-be. So the things that we think our customers see as attractive can shift into must-bes over time. It can also happen in reverse what once was neutral can become attractive if we repackage it or redesign it to be better. Sticking with a mobile phone example, most of us now have touchscreen phones, but now there's an iteration where phone that can fold out and provide a bigger and better touchscreen.
Speaker 1:So, using the categories of the Kano model together with the voice of the customer statements, can help us prioritize during engineering implementation. So what's today's insight to action? Site to action. Just like we rate potential risks with a severity to be able to prioritize and make decisions, we can rate our different customer wants and requests with the categories of a Kano model. We can then apply the thought processes of the Kano model, that special two by two chart, to be able to help us decide how well we want to implement it into our product design. We can evaluate how well to implement these feature requests by the value that they contribute. At qualityduringdesigncom, there is a podcast blog For most all podcasts. There is at least a blog On the podcast blog. For this episode, I'll include the Kana model and some other lists and tables that may be helpful for you to introduce this idea to your team and apply it in practice. While you're visiting the blog, scroll to the bottom of the page and sign up for the newsletter. This has been a production of Dini Enterprises. Thanks for listening.
