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Reading 14: Product and Service Design - Coggle Diagram
Reading 14: Product and Service Design
Introduction
most products/services has a life cycle outdated, new competitors, old tech - new better design
The importance of new product development
new product/service development V. important in org.
Risk changing and damage brand or not changing and being obsolete
Many have constant development production in place to ensure stands out from competitors
New product development categorised in 3 ways
Incremental enhancement of existing products: improving/changing existing products
New Generation Products: completely new or redesigned product
Breakthrough products: A brand new product creating its own category - first ever smart phone
New Product Failure Rates
Not many new product designs succeed - Schneider and Hall (2011) 5 main reasons for failure of new product launches
Company cannot support the growth - if v. successful then can't invest required to handle sales
Product launched too soon - not functionally ready to meet req.
Product does not have sufficient appeal to market - customers may not feel any benefit for upgrading or changing brand
The Customer does not understand the product - new tech can be hard to use and customers put off until they learn
There is no market for the product despite its novel features - Things can be very innovative but just not a big seller
Design as a Process
most design processes are broken into manageable steps eg.
slack et al. (2011) eg of steps
Concept generation -
concept screening
Preliminary design
Evaluation and improvement
Prototyping and final design
UK design council split it into 4 phases - figure 1, pg 127
Discover
Define
Develop
Deliver
Design Thinking
IDEO example - design thinking. "empowered by research, innovation, understanding, observation, likes & dislikes,
sometimes designing new things or recycling old ideas and rechanging the design
6 common principles for design thinking
Reframe ideas - is assumptions being made? can you look from a different angle?
Understand the user - at a deeper level. Gain insight into their needs and values
No idea is too wild - quick ideas and avoid restraints, generate range of human centric solutions
Collaborate - multi-discipliary team, use people to solve problems from different perspectives
Test your ideas - create low cost prototypes quickly and obtain feedback immediatley on how this meets users needs
See the bigger picture - "look at business and design strategies holistically so that you look at the value of what you are doing in the right context"
The design of products and services
Product Design
Aesthetics - syling important guests may choose less functionality for a better design
Reliability - Product must be reliable for not just a short time
Maintainability - Can it be easily maintained?
Durability - address how long product is expected to last, will it come obsolete
Produce-ability - can it be easily made / cost appropriate for market? Designers/Producers able to put it together? How can it be packaged safely? how will it fit on pallets. how will it be transported
Service design: the service concept (Johnston and Clark "2005) five elements of service concept
The Organising Idea - statement of the nature of the service being bought. helps to identify the most important elements of the overall service experience. What is the overall purpose of the service that is being offered? Statement identifies some of the key aspects of what the service must include in terms of both tangible facilities and intangible experiences
The service experience - when designing a service need to think about customers direct experience of the service process. Includes steps the customer goes to experience the service, how the customer interacts with the service and how staff providing the service deal with the customer. "moments of truth", where each service interaction between provider and customer acts as a point where value can be created. How does service engage customers senses? what can they see/hear/taste/smell?
The service outcome - designers must have a clear understanding of the outcome the customer is seeking and how this is measured. Continuing the example of the fitness centre, the outcome might be an enjoyable hour in the spa or pool or and exhilarating fitness session to feel stronger and healthier
The Service Operation - Any design must identify all aspects of how the service is delivered. The physical facilities such as car parks, changing rooms, food options are part of the service operation. Facilities have to be designed to make customer feel welcome = easy to use and efficient. systems need to be well designed to reduce waits and delays
The Value of service - customer will compare the perceived benefits of the service against its costs. does price reflect quality, is there any extra charges? what aspects of service does customer values most
Quality function deployment
One tool that is used to work design priorities and to define technical specification is called quality function deployment (QFD) or "house of quality" because the look of the matrix
Process of deriving new set of product or service design characteristics can be divided into 6 steps
Identify WHAT attributed or features the customer wants from the product or service
Identify the product characteristics that would be necessary to meet the customers' needs (and HOW needs are met)
Identify the exact links between attributes and characteristics (what vs how)
Identify CONFLICTS or trade-offs between characteristics that require further developmental effort or compromise
compare the proposed features with the features in competing products and decide on the relative importance of the product characteristics. Establish WHY you want a certain characteristic to be deployed
Decide which characteristics to deploy and the level of that characteristic (HOW MUCH?)
Figure 2. Page 133 - The basic elements of a QFD matrix
A worked example of the QFD matrix
Identify what attributes or features the customer wants
first step to understand customers needs and preferences when buying a product. market research, customer observation, input from employees - outcome is a detailed list of customer needs and references relating to the design and performance of new product together with an early indication of their apparent relative importance.
Identify the product characteristics that meet the needs
each product or service may have a number of different elements or components that are needed to meet all of the req.
Link the customer attributes to the product characteristics
Link the customer attributes to the product characteristics
A relationship matrix is created, showing how the customer requirements are related to the product characteristics
Figure 3 - relationship matrix, pg 134
The purpose of the matrix to show whether the technical attributes meet the customer requirements adequately. One technical feature of component may influence more than one performance characterisitc.
There are many other relationships between the list of requirments and the componenets and characteristics that can be identified.
Identify conflicts or trade offs
when product characteristics are being specified, there will be features where ther is a trade-off or conflict between some elements. Eg wanting something strong/sturdy and lightweight
important to identify these trade offs as soon as you can because there are actions you can take at the design stage to address some of these.
Figure 4. Illustration of QFD roof showing relationships between product features. pg 135. symbols used to record + & - relationships
Evaluate rival products
in order to compare how product will compete to the market it is useful to compare performance of rivals.
importance ratings should be established for customer attribute, so that there can be some objectivity within the comparison.
ideally relative levels of importance should be determined from the initial market research data. Where rival products perform badly against an attribute which has a high importance rating, a potential source of competitive advantage for the new product has been found - decide which features need to be comparable and which could be designed as better features.
Decide which characteristics to deploy any technical specification
If a product is believed to be important then a strict technical target can be defined. sometimes a products percieved quality is influenced more by image or company reputation and a lower technical specification is approproate
At the final stage you decide which of these characteristics should be in the final design and hence which product characteristics you "deploy" in the final specification.
Figure 5, Full QFD matrix - based on digital camera example
This stage uses in-house testing to establish the actiual links beteen a products technical charactericics and consumer appeal.
Once completed the sequence the QFD will look like Figure 5 page 136
Cascading the QFD matric to other levels
QFD matric can be used at other, further levels of analysis. At the next level, it can be used to define the characteristics of individual components. This can develop quality conrol/production plans that detail how quality is measured as the product is made. Figure 6 represents this cascading of the QFD matrix
Figure 6 pg 137 - Cascading of QFD to production plans
Although the QFD matrix seems to be a time-consuming method of structuring ideas of product or service design, it has been shown that the approach helps reduce the amount of rework of design, reducing costs and speeding the design lead time.
Further detailed explanation of QFD. refer to the hauser and clausing article "the house of quality 1988