Research in Managing Customer Requirement and Product Conceptualization

Customer requirement management has become one of principal factors for product development to succeed in the marketplace. Poor understanding of customer requirements and inaccurate assumptions made during the elicitation and analysis of requirement information have significant negative implications on design and manufacturing of the product in terms of quality, the lead time and cost. Traditionally, consumer market research has been performed to provide direction and support for product development functions. However, due to the increasingly volatile marketplaces where customer requirements change quickly, the needs of customers might have varied from the originally elicited set by the time the products reach the marketplaces. Hence, the recent wide-spread usage of the Internet by consumers for information exchanges has provided a means for product developing companies to elicit real-time consumer intelligence. To tap on the massive amount of information on the Internet, computational toolsets that can extract and analyze customer-related data will be necessary. In this regard, the future relevance of the research in design informatics has attracted academics with various backgrounds, mainly from the domains of computer science, artificial intelligence, cognitive science, product design and innovation, and consumer intelligence. With respect to a holistic view of design informatics in consumer-centric product conceptualization, key challenges and future research directions are identified.