An Integrated Method for Customer-Oriented Product Design

This paper introduces a customer-oriented design method in new product development (NPD). This method comprises of persona creation, analytic hierarchy process (AHP), quality function deployment (QFD) and usability engineering. Persona creation based on fuzzy cluster analysis is first employed to identify the typical behaviors and motivations of a broader range of customers. The customer requirements (CRs) are extracted from the persona profiles and then prioritized with a semi-fuzzy AHP approach. Using the QFD method, the prioritized CRs are translated into measurable design requirements (DRs) to set the design targets. After product prototyping, scenario-based usability testing techniques are employed to access and make recommendations to improve usability in product redesign. The above process may be repeated with several iterations until a product that more closely matches the customer needs with high usability can be designed. A new sports earphones design is given as an example to illustrate the implementation of this method.