A customer requirements analysis method of considering product scenarios for improving product design

Abstract

With increasing concerns on customer requirements (CRs) in product improvement, the research of integrating product scenarios into CRs analysis has attracted the attention of designers. Importance-performance-analysis (IPA), which can be used to represent the relationship between CR importance and product performance, is a well-known model for analyzing CRs. However, a major challenge of the IPA model is the quantification of the importance of CRs accurately. Network analysis (NA) is an appropriate method to understand and calculate the importance of CRs in different usage scenarios. This research presents a Network Analysis-Importance Performance Analysis (NA-IPA) model that integrates NA with the IPA model to improve product design through mapping CRs to configuration plans. Accordingly, two mechanisms are integrated to support product design improvement, namely, (1) the classifier of the NA-IPA model is used to categorise CRs, and (2) the performance indicator is introduced as an evaluation metric of product configuration plans. A case study on product improvement was carried out for the interior space of automotive, to validate the feasibility and advantages of the proposed method. This proposed NA-IPA model provides designers with an efficient method to improve product design and customer satisfaction in response to market competition.