Product Design Assignment: Review Chapter 5 & Chapter 6
Kukuh Faedlur Rahman
14522125
Chapter 5: Identifying Customer Needs
Before you start to promote your business, you need to know your customers want and why.
Good customer research helps you work out how to convince and attract the customer that
they need your products and services.
Identifying customer needs is a first step in the concept development process. There are 5
process in identifying customer needs:
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
Gather raw data from customers.
Interpret the raw data in terms of customer needs.
Organize the needs into a hierarchy.
Establish the relative importance of the needs
Reflect on the results and the process.
Creating
a high-quality
information
channel
from
customers
to the product
developers ensures that those who directly control the details of the product, including the
product designers,
fully understand the needs of the customer.
Lead users are a good source of customer needs because they experience new needs
months or years ahead of most customers and because they stand to benefit substan
tially from new product innovations. Furthermore, they are frequently able to articulate
their needs more clearly than typical customers. Extreme users have special needs that
may reflect latent needs among mainstream users.
Latent needs may be even more important than explicit needs in determining customer
satisfaction. Latent needs are those that many customers recognize as important in a
final product but do not or cannot articulate in advance.
Customer needs should be expressed in terms of what the product has to do, not
in terms of how the product might be implemented. Adherence to this principle leaves the
development team with maximum flexibility to generate and select product concepts.
The key benefits of the method are ensuring that the product is focused on customer
needs and that no critical customer need is forgotten; developing a clear understanding
among members of the development team of the needs of the customers in the target
market; developing a fact base to be used in generating concepts, selecting a product
concept, and establishing product specifications; and creating an archival record of the
needs phase of the development process.
Chapter 6: Product Specification
Customer
needs are generally expressed
in
the "language
of the customer." To
provide specific guidance about how to design and engineer a product,
teams estab lish a set of specifications,
which spell out in precise,
what the product has to do to be commercially
successful.
development
measurable detail
The specifications
must
reflect the customer needs, differentiate the product from the competitive products,
and be technically and economically realizable.
Specifications are typically established at least twice. Immediately after identifying the
customer
needs, the team sets target specifications. After concept selection and testing,
the team developsfinal specifications.
Target specifications represent the hopes and aspirations of the team, but they are
estab lished before the team knows the constraints the product technology will place on
what can be achieved. The team's efforts may fail to meet some of these specifications and
may exceed others, depending on the details of the product concept the team eventually
selects. The process of establishing the target specifications entails four steps:
1.
2.
3.
4.
Prepare the list of metrics.
Collect competitive benchmarking information.
Set ideal and marginally acceptable target values.
Reflect on the results and the process.
Final specifications
are developed
by assessing
the actual
constraints and the expected production costs using analytical
technological
and physical models.
During this refinement phase the team must make difficult trade-offs among various
desirable characteristics
of the product. The five-step
process
for refining
the
specifications is:
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
Develop technical models of the product.
Develop a cost model of the product.
Refine the specifications, making trade-offs where necessary.
Flow down the specifications as appropriate.
Reflect on the results and the process.
The specifications process is facilitated by several simple information systems that
can easily be created using conventional spreadsheet software. Tools such as the list
of metrics, the needs-metrics
matrix, the competitive benchmarking
charts, and the
competitive maps all support the team's decision
making by providing the team with a
way to represent and discuss the specifications.
Because of the need to utilize the best possible knowledge
of the market, the
customers, the core product technology, and the cost implications of design alternatives,
the specifications
process
requires
active
participation
from
team
members
representing the marketing, design, and manufacturing functions of the enterprise.