Kano Analysis
The Kano Analysis is used to determine how much impact certain attributes of products have on the customer. It is used to prevent designers from constantly adding more features to products, and instead step back and question what is really needed and desired. Of course, since customer attitudes change over time, the Kano Analysis is most useful during cultural, economic, or technological shifts in order to determine the current customer climate. The Kano Analysis sorts the questioned product attribute into one of 5 categories: required, desired, exciter, neutral, and anti-feature.
“Required” refers to the basic features of the product that must be included. Some examples are safety, security, and legislative requirements. It doesn’t necessarily improve customer satisfaction, but will definitely worsen the experience without it. “Desired” attributes are ones that will negatively impact customer satisfaction without it, but also improve customer satisfaction with it. An example of this is free wifi in a coffee shop. One can imagine the customer would be quite happy to visit if there was free wifi, and be quite upset if they had to instead pay for the wifi. An “exciter” attribute is a surprise element, something that a customer wouldn’t think to ask for but is still welcomed. An example of this would be a dress with pockets. Customers don’t typically search for a dress for its pockets, but when there is one, it’s usually welcomed. A “neutral” attribute is one that doesn’t invoke any feelings either way, it’s neither positive or negative. An example of this would be the color of a boba straw. Most people don’t care about what color they get, since it’s just a one time use item, and also not the focus of the product. The last attribute is the “anti-feature.” This is what you should leave out, since having it can negatively affect customer satisfaction. However, sometimes these can be left in to encourage the user to pay to get rid of them. An example of this would be leaving in ads in a free service and then offering an ad free paid version. In a negative case, this would cause the customer to seek an alternative service.
The Kano Analysis is conducted by asking a pair of questions for each attribute in question. The first question would ask how the customer would feel if the attribute were present, and the second, if it were absent. It would work something like this: Questions: “If CMU provided Adobe CC how would you feel?” and “If CMU did not provide Adobe CC how would you feel?” Once you collect the responses, you would cross reference them in the table to see which category each attribute belongs to. Then, you can plot each attribute onto a Kano category, and see how the attribute will affect customer satisfaction.
