Study of middle-aged and youth users’ preference for smart homes

Abstract

Nowadays Smart home will optimize traditional life style and life habit, it brings brand new experience and feeling, and it will become future’s main life style and life habit. But now smart home products are still at start-up period of product’s development life cycle. What functions can attract consumption and are necessary? What functions are necessary but have no attraction? These function demands of users are not understood thoroughly. So far, there is no much study to differentiate varieties of function demands of smart home. In addition, their preference for requirements of smart home is different as different groups are different in consumption psychology and consumption behavior. For example, the consumption behavior of middle-aged group is rather conservative and youth group is active in thinking and likes to buy some new products and try new life. Therefore how to position the development of relative smart home products according to different target groups is an important subject needed to think. This study tries to employ positive and negative questionnaire survey form to survey on users’ requirement satisfaction degree to obtain key properties of attracting two consumption groups based on Kano Model theoretical basis and the study objects are middle-aged and youth consumers. Traditional Kano model overlooks users’ uncertain thinking, and for a question having uncertain choices, questionnaire design must be conducted combining with fuzzy theory. Besides, as the range of smart home industry is too wide, in this study the author takes smart home air healthy products as an example, conducts user interview about home air purifier, collects expert and experienced product designer’s suggestions, screens out 10 secondary indexes to build key properties of home air purifiers and judges the property and category of 10 functions by Kano model to infer middle-aged and youth consumers’ demand preference difference for home air purifier thus finally providing references for future’s smart home products according to analysis results.