Method Of Improving Product Usability While Upgrading Based On QFD

As time goes by, people’s life has been improved and their demand for life qualityhas been increased day by day. Under such competition pressure, more and moreenterprises have to seek closer integration of product R&D and customers’requirements.. Nowadays, whether or not to achieve the implementation of thecustomer oriented R&D process has become the key element for enterprises to survive.Today’s market, flooded with variety of products, has left customers so many choices.Products that lack of core competence and ignore users’ psychology will be eliminatedeventually by this market. In this buyer’s market, a new pattern of the sustainabledevelopment and cycling upgrading has emerged in our sight. Almost every companyhas its top-selling series, which have considerable market share and make thecompany’s further development possible.Quality Function Development is a general product design method which cantransfer customers’ requirements (CRs) to technical requirements (TRs). Due toconsistent customer orientation and thorough consideration of R&D cost and technicaldifficulties, it has been used widely in both traditional manufacturing industry and otherservice industry. The concept of usability is a very important consideration for theproduct R&D period, which provides a system to get easy access of the product qualityreview. When using the concept of usability in describing the product function,redundant information is removed and better customer feedback is received. Therefore,if we combine the Usability Test with the process to obtain customers’ requirements ofQFD, accuracy will be strengthened. Usability Test gives the quantitative description ofcustomers’ satisfaction degree while Kano Model gives the qualitative analysis of thecustomers’ requirements, in this way, experimental data is purified and redundancy istaken out.After synthetic discussion of different models, this paper summarizes amethodology, which aims to increase product usability while upgrading from theperspective of customers and to give guidance to enterprises for their new product R&D.Firstly, Usability Test and Kano Test is used to acquire the customers’ requirements.Secondly, House of Quality Model transfers customers’ requirements to technical requirements. Lastly, after consideration of technology upgrading difficulties in theR&D process, we get to the result of technology upgrading priority to help enterprisesallocate resources more wisely in the next R&D process.In the last part of this paper, an application case is shown to test the feasibility ofthe methodology above, and to give a better guidance for the companies.