Customer Requirement Management in Product Development

Abstract

Customer requirement management has been wellrecognized as the principal factor for developing a successful product in the marketplace. This has been acknowledged in an exponentially increasing number of publications in the field of customer satisfaction and requirement management, as well as in many endeavors in industrial applications. This research topic shows a multidisciplinary characteristic involving such fields as business studies, marketing research, psychological studies, human factors, software requirement engineering, and of course product and engineering design. In recent times, the importance of these front-end issues has been catalyzed by enormous e-commerce applications. This special issue is dedicated to the recent advances in customer requirement management. While requirement engineering has been intensively studied in the field of software and information systems, the focus of this special issue is given to the design and development of consumer and capital products. Based on the thorough and strict peer reviews, a total of eight papers are selected for publication from 38 submissions. These papers represent a snapshot of the cutting-edge research progress and aim to disseminate information on recent developments in the field of customer requirement management. The article by Jiao, Chen, and Fung, ‘Customer Requirement Management in Product Development: A Review of Research Issues’, provides a comprehensive literature review. It substantially extends this editorial discussion on the status quo of approaches and techniques for customer requirement management in product development. The article discusses the general process of customer requirement management. The emphasis is on a holistic view and system-wide solutions that encompass requirement elicitation, analysis, and specification. In the article, avenues for future research are highlighted along with technical challenges. Henson, Barnes, Livesey, Childs, and Ewart, in their article, ‘Affective Consumer Requirements: A Case Study of Moisturizer Packaging’, apply affective engineering approaches to the elicitation of customers’ subjective requirements. A case study of moisturizer packaging is reported, demonstrating how to recombine stimuli that have been tested separately. The results of focus groups and semantic questionnaires are fine-tuned based on the principal component analysis in order to translate the subjective requirements into values for physical properties of the packaging. The elicited requirements regarding surface textures, shape, and color are validated through the questionnaire responses to prototype packaging. The article by Khalid and Helander, ‘Customer Emotional Needs in Product Design’, emphasizes on the emotional aspect of customer requirements. The characteristics of customer emotions are discussed in detail, along with issues concerning their measurement and evaluation. They present a framework of articulating customer emotions in relation to the designer’s environment. As part of the product development life cycle, the framework enables customer needs and measured emotions to be fed early in the design process, so as to achieve a pleasurable and satisfying product. With focus on the relationships between consumers’ Kansei feelings and products’ formal elements, Chen *Author to whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail: jiao@pmail.ntu.edu.sg