Identifying customer wants, needs, and demands

“Recognizing the need,” Charles Eames stated, “is the primary condition for design.” Early in their careers together, Charles and Ray Eames (see p. 31) identified the need for affordable yet high-quality furniture for the average consumer—furniture that could serve a variety of uses. For 40 years they experimented with ways to meet this challenge: designing flexibility into their compact storage units and collapsible sofas for the home; seating for stadiums, airports, and schools; and chairs for virtually anywhere.

This section concentrates on methods and tips to help you, as a product designer, focus on connecting your creative output with the customers most likely to appreciate and value it. It covers ways in which a product designer can best go about defining what their customers really want.

Identifying customers’ needs, wants, and/or demands can be a very challenging and complex task. Often a client or a customer will express these in their own linguistic style of expression, which can be too unclear or ambiguous for a designer to proceed with. The main task that the designer faces at this point is translating what the customer wants or needs, derived from the information collected during the research stages, into a set of statements about what the product has to do.

The following four stages of identifying customers’ needs should help you progress from an initial vague customer statement to establishing clear and unambiguous design specification targets:

Stage 1: Interpret and analyze the information from customers

Interpreting the statements of the customer and expressing them in a manner that is useful for the design team to progress is the first step. A useful chart can be constructed with this information by placing questions posed to the customer in the left-hand column, the customer statement in the middle, and the interpreted design objective in the right-hand column.

There are five steps to develop vague customer statements into defined design objectives:

• Try to express the design objective in terms of what the producthas to do, not in terms of how it might do it.
• Try to express the customer statement as specifically as thedesign objective.
• Try to use positive, not negative, statements.
• Express each customer need as an attribute of the product.
• Try to avoid the terms must and should as they imply a level of importance for the need.

Stage 2: Organize the customers’ needs into a hierarchy of primary, secondary, and tertiary design objectives

The design objectives need to be organized into a hierarchical list that comprises a set of primary needs, a set of secondary needs, and possibly a set of tertiary needs. Usually, the primary design objectives are the most general needs while the secondary and tertiary design objectives are expressed in more detail.

Here are six steps for developing the hierarchical list of design objectives:

• Print or write each design objective on a separate card or sticky note.
• Eliminate redundant design objectives, group the remainder together, and treat them as a single objective. Take care to group only objectives together that are identical in meaning.
• Group the sticky notes together according to the similarity of the design objectives. The key objective of this process is to address the needs of the customer in the design objectives hierarchy. Some design teams have been known to invite the customer to help in this process.
• Select a heading for each group of design objectives.
• If there are fewer than 20 groups of design objectives then atwo-level hierarchy of primary and secondary design objectives is sufficient. If there are more than 20 groups then you may need to create a third level in the hierarchy.
• Reflect on the design objectives hierarchical list created and, if appropriate, review and edit the lists or groups.

Stage 3: Establish the relative importance of the customers’ needs

You will need to determine the relative importance of each individual design objective translated from the customers’ needs. There are a number of ways of conducting this activity. The design team could meet and discuss the importance of each objective and assign relative ratings for each on a consensus basis, or it could be completed after further discussion with customers, perhaps during a focus group activity. Another way of defining the relative importance of design features can be conducted using the pairwise comparison method (see p. 69) or by using a relative importance survey.

Pairwise comparison allows designers to determine the relative order (ranking) of a group of product objectives. This is often used as part of a process of assigning weights to objectives in product design concept development. First arrange the objectives in a row along the top and in a row along the side. Pairs of objectives can then be compared systematically against one another by entering a 1 or 0 against each objective depending on whether the first objective is considered more or less important than the second and so on. Continue working along each row of the matrix, entering a 1 if the objective is deemed more important and a 0 if the objective is considered less important, until you come to the end. When all the comparisons have been made with the pairs of objectives the row totals indicate the rank order of the objectives.

Relative importance surveys are another effective way of identifying the relative weightings of individual product objectives. Typically, a scale of 1 (the product feature is undesirable and customers would not consider a product with this feature), through 3 (the product feature would be nice to have but is not crucial), on to 5 (the product feature is critical and customers would not consider a product without this feature) can be used to describe the importance of each product objective.

Stage 4: Reflect on the results and the process

The final step in translating the customers’ needs into clear and unambiguous design objectives is to reflect on the process and the results. It is important that you challenge and reflect on the results that you have arrived at and evaluate them against the needs expressed by the customers.

Consider the following questions during and after this process:

• Have we communicated with our target customers?
• Have we managed to encapsulate any latent needs of our targetcustomers that may currently not be addressed in existing products?
• Are there any areas we need to follow up in future interviews?
• Of these customers, who would be good to use in future projects?
• What have we learned that we didn’t know at the start of this project?
• Are we surprised by any of the results during this project?
• Did we omit anyone that we should include in the next project?
• How might we improve this process in the next project?