Applying the Kano Model to Design and New Product Development

Customer satisfaction is the major concern to many leading companies throughout the world.Customer satisfaction is the major concern to many leading companies throughout the world. More firms use satisfaction ratings as an indicator of the performance of products and services and as an indicator of the company’s future. As lately shown companies that are able to identify customer needs and align these with their core competencies are those who champion innovation. Innovation champions combine their vision and core competencies with customers’ knowledge when creating new products.Product development is a complex task in which a great deal of human physical resources, methods, and tools are involved. Understanding and identification of users needs are the important factors in product development process. Manufacturing enterprises are increasingly focusing on satisfying individual customer needs in a highly competitive global market. A constant challenge for manufacturers is how to deal with the customer satisfaction, which in turn largely determines the customers’willingness to buy the products.The Kano model is the effective one theobviousand hiddenusers needsandclassify themin terms ofproductfunctions. The present study addresses the role of Kano methodin developingnew products that are both functionally and emotionally satisfying the customer’s needs. The Kano model of customer satisfaction classifies product attributes based on how they are perceived by customers and their effect on customer satisfaction. The Kano method builds from the premise that a combination of the level of functional fulfillment and emotional satisfaction that a customer receives from a product relates to the customer’s assessment of the product’s quality. Kano model distinguishes three types of product requirements that influence customer satisfaction in different ways. The three different types of qualities are 1) the must-be or basic quality, 2)one-dimensional or performance quality, and 3) The attractive or excitement quality. Besides these three, two more quality types can be identified: the indifference and reversal qualities. Kano and his research team group proposed that the functional and emotional aspects of each product, varied across a product’s attributes, and that designers should target the proper combinations of functional fulfillment and emotional satisfaction when designing product attributes. The case studyhas been presented in this paper represent the design of dinnerwarebased on Iranian users' feelings using the combination of twomethods: the Kano classification system and the self-report classification approach. Based ontheGestaltelements of the products, thirteen attributes were chosen. The attributes were then studied in two kinds of questionnaires. The first questioner contained functional and dysfunctional questions of Kano model. In the second one, the subjects were asked to express their own perception to rank these attributes within Kano categorization.37 university students (20 women, 17 men) participated voluntary as subjects in this study.The results indicated the fact that Iranian users consider the functions of type of arrangement of the dishes for each person and usage of curve and free forms as attractive requirements in the design of the dinnerware.The resultsshowusingcombination of these twomethodswillenhance thequalityandvalidity offindings.