An Integrated Methodology for Propagating the Voice of the Customer into the Conceptual Design Process

Abstract

The elementary conceptual design loop is made of understanding and measuring the customer need, proposing product concepts and propagating the customer need along the product deployment, and finally assessing concepts in a multi-criteria way in regards to the need. Many methods from various disciplines (industrial/design engineering, psychophysics, multi-criteria decision analysis, marketing, artificial intelligence, statistical analysis) presently contribute partially to support this design loop. But few methods propose an integrated and coherent framework to deal with this elementary conceptual design loop. In this article, we propose such a methodology which is a coherent combination of classical methods in psychophysics, marketing and decision theory, namely multidimensional scaling, semantic differential method, factor analysis, pairwise comparison and Analytical Hierarchy Process. Our approach provides designers with a tool which helps the definition of the semantic part of the need, it rates and ranks the new product prototypes according to their proximity to the “ideal product”, and it underlines the particular semantic dimensions that could be improved. To illustrate our approach, we have performed users’ tests and applied our methodology to the design of table glasses. For clarity, each stage of the methodology is presented in detail on this particular example.