Improving Customer Attribute Management Within the House of Quality by Integrating the Non-User

The House of Quality is an established model for human centric product development, that among other aspects uses both customer attributes and product requirements to define a product and its most important features. Industry application of this model is difficult due to its overall complexity and lack of clear instructions on how to specifically build a catalogue of customer attributes from user research in particular and how to prioritize them. This contribution seeks to simplify customer attribute formation and management by introducing the concept of non-use within a use case. Types of non-use and reasons for non-use of robot vacuums are examined and decoded into attributes. Attributes of users and non-users are compared and analyzed. By introducing a clear interview structure for users and non-users, this contribution visualizes how to translate interviews to attributes used within the House of Quality. The use case discussed in this contribution indicates that non-use can yield more information than conventional user research, since non-users’ reasons for non-use were more extensive than users’ negative feedback about the product and could therefore generate more attributes. Industry feedback suggests that non-user attributes are similar to user attributes and can therefore be used in place of user attributes.