KANO Model to understand your customer and better scope requirements
Understanding what will really impress your customers.
Our work always has a target audience. Be they a paying customer, client or a boss, there is someone who is eagerly awaiting your output. The delivery of this work might be met with one of several reactions:
- Delight — “Wow — this is amazing and does so much more than I was expecting!”
- Acceptance — “Thanks, this work exactly meets the brief”
- Passable, with changes — “This barely meets my criteria, please make these changes, at your own cost”
- Outright rejection — “ this is crap and nothing like what I was after”
- Disappointment — some of this is great but if this isn’t fixed I wont be able to use it
This last category in particular has undone many great products. Fully featured and great in concept only to be undone by a fatal flaw that is a basic customer expectation. Consider the current communications app Zoom. Undoubtedly the best of its kind in easy to use video communication but people using this have a basic expectation that using an app like this, their privacy would be protect — apparently this is not the case and could well see many people stop using it.
It is critical you understand what features are required to ensure the work is landing towards the top of these reactions, not the bottom. The trick however is that often it is not always clear to customer in their own minds what exactly they are after.
Enter the Kano model, this provides a mental model to work through to pull out these criteria.
The Kano Model of product development and customer satisfaction was published in 1984 by Dr Noriaki Kano, professor of quality management at the Tokyo University of Science.
Kano says that a product or service is about much more than just functionality. It is also about customers’ emotions.
The model assigns three attributes to products and services:
- Threshold Attributes. These are the basics that customers expect.
- Performance Attributes. These increase a customer’s enjoyment but aren’t essential. Some of these may need to be scaled back, so that you can deliver Threshold and Excitement Attributes.
- Excitement Attributes. These are the surprise elements of a product or service that delight customers.
Understanding your customers’ experiences and expectations, and effectively generating innovative ideas for improving your product or service, are key to carrying out Kano Model Analysis successfully.
On Kanomodel.com the author Dave Verduyn also highlight two additional categories:
4. Indifferent Attributes. These are the requirements that most customers simply don’t care about whether they are present or absent, their satisfaction remains neutral under either circumstance.
5. Reverse Attribute. These are the requirements that cause dissatisfaction when present and satisfaction when absent. They are the features or attributes that cause customers to say “I hate when they do that”.
Asking good questions
I have curated numerous great questions to ask in a range of situations. Completing a Kano model is no different and relies on you teasing out of the customer, requirements for the final solution. There are many good question sources on line - for example this set from from Garrot Kroll (Questions UX Designers should be asking):
- If you wanted to perform [task], what would you do?
- What would you expect to happen?
- What parts of your current process are the most/least important for you?
- What, if anything about your current process, do you like or dislike?
- If you had a magic wand, what would you change?
- How could we present the information in a more meaningful way?
- Is there anything you would change/add/remove to make this better for you?
- What was the hardest part about this? and what would make it easier?
- Was there anything surprising or unexpected?
Influence of Time
It is an intuitive but important item to note that over time, features that were once exciters to the customers progressively become expected, so you can’t rest on your laurels and assume that the old assumptions apply. This model needs to be continually updated!
Innovations only last so long until the customers start requesting these features or the competition copies them and eventually they becomes the standard. Kanomodel.com
Support Tools
In fleshing out this canvas a number of other design thinking and agile tools or Lean UX Tools will prove very useful.
These can include the Value Proposition Canvas, Customer Journey maps, Moscow Matrix
More like this….
- Kanban your work — The Kanban method is in the Agile suite of tools that can help you visualise and prioritise work.
- Design thinking and lean startup concepts to make your team more agile. — A summary of some of the reference material I have found most useful in exploring design thinking and lean start-up concepts to get to the heart of the problem you are trying to solve
- Swarm Intelligence — Can managers develop simple rules to shape the behaviour of their organizations and replace rigid command-and-control structures?
- Complex Adaptive Systems — Simple Rules, Unpredictable Outcomes — The concept of managing through a series of simple rules is an intriguing one. Could magic in our organisations occur through less rather than more control?
- Questions to get you unstuck… — A good question can be just the trick you need to remove the block and get things flowing again.
