Integrating comprehensive customer requirements into product design

Identification of customer needs is the starting point of design process. Most of design methodologies focus on technical domains to define customer requirements. However, the success of product design nowadays goes beyond technical features; it often depends heavily on multi-facets of customers' needs including various business parameters. Moreover, the qualitative and subjective factors such as affection, aesthetic appearance, user friendliness and brand loyalty are essential to the ultimate acceptance of a new product. This paper presents a probabilistic approach to elicit, characterize the qualitative customers' latent and subjective preferences and incorporate them into product design. Copyright © 2011 CIRP. Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.