A Use of Subjective Clustering to Support Affinity Diagram Results in Customer Needs Analysis
Abstract
Analysis of customer needs is a critical first step in successful product development. Customer needs analysis typically consists of interviewing potential customers to understand their needs, grouping similar needs to identify representative needs, and asking customers to evaluate relative importance of the representative needs. Using the importance data, customers may be grouped according to the priorities they place on representative needs. This article compares two approaches for identifying representative needs - affinity diagram (AD) and subjective clustering (SC) - and presents a use of SC to support grouping results obtained from AD. The application of both AD and SC in identifying representative needs is demonstrated using the customer need analysis of the next generation particle accelerator. © The Author(s), 20http://dx.doi.org/10.
Recommended Citation
S. Takai and K. Ishii, "A Use of Subjective Clustering to Support Affinity Diagram Results in Customer Needs Analysis," Concurrent Engineering Research and Applications, SAGE Publications, Jan 2010.
The definitive version is available at https://doi.org/10.1177/1063293X10372792
Department(s)
Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering
Keywords and Phrases
Affinity Diagram; Customer Needs; Importance Rating; Segmentation; Subjective Clustering
Document Type
Article - Journal
Document Version
Citation
File Type
text
Language(s)
English
Rights
© 2010 SAGE Publications, All rights reserved.
Publication Date
01 Jan 2010
