In product design and engineering, identifying customer needs is the foundation for designing and producing a successful product. Traditionally, a range of techniques have been employed to elicit customer needs. A relatively new technique for identifying customer needs is ‘crowdsourcing’. An emerging area of research is the crowdsourcing of customer needs from online product review sites. This paper proposes a simple process for crowdsourcing customer needs for product design using text analytics. The analysis/visualization method is presented in detail. The text content of online customer reviews for a popular product is collected and processed using text analytics software. A published case study identifying expressed customer needs for the same generic product, collected via conventional means, is used to successfully validate the findings from the text analytics method.

1. Stuart Palmer(@s_palm )
Deakin University
Australia
Crowdsourcing Customer
Needs for Product Design
using Text Analytics

2. Customer needs elicitation
Traditionally…
Surveys
Interviews
Focus groups
Market research
Interactive queries
Sales data

3. Online task markets (AMT)
Public design competitions
Online customer communities (Dell IdeaStorm)
Social media platforms
Open design platforms (OpenIDEO)
Engaging customers in design evaluation
Internal company innovation forums
Crowdsourcing in product design

4. Large quantities of data obtained easily
New reviews are typically frequently added
Data are from real, post-purchase experiences
(rather than hypothetical purchasing scenarios)
Typically free/unstructured responses
Generally provided without incentives
Social media in product design

5. “… a set of linguistic, statistical, and machine
learning techniques that model and structure
the information content of textual sources for
business intelligence, exploratory data analysis,
research, or investigation.” (Hu & Liu, 2012, p.
388)
Text analytics

6. Locate design requirements case study
Collect product reviews from amazon.com
Use KH Coder to analyse/visualise review data
http://khc.sourceforge.net/en/
Examine visualisations for themes representing
possible customer requirements
Method

7. 1. Stability of stand/instrument
2. Low cost/good value
3. Easy to use
4. Aesthetically pleasing
5. Can hold other types of instruments – guitar,
viola, etc.
6. Portable for travel
Violin stand requirements

8. Co-occurrence network

9. Multidimensional scaling plot

10. Hierarchical cluster analysis
dendrogram

11. CON MDS HCA
Stability of Stand/Instrument

12. CON MDS HCA
Stability of Stand/Instrument

13. Low Cost/Good Value
CON MDS HCA

14. Low Cost/Good Value
CON MDS HCA

15. CON MDS HCA
Easy to Use

16. CON MDS HCA
Easy to Use

17. Aesthetically Pleasing
CON MDS HCA

18. Aesthetically Pleasing
CON MDS HCA

19. Can Hold Other Types of Instruments
CON MDS HCA

20. Can Hold Other Types of Instruments
CON MDS HCA

21. Portable for Travel
CON MDS HCA

22. Portable for Travel
CON MDS HCA

23. Other product characteristics
CON MDS HCA

24. Other product characteristics
CON MDS HCA

25. A simple process for crowdsourcing customer
needs for product design using text analytics
All of the six desired product characteristics
present in the visualizations produced
The crowdsourcing/text analytics process
identified another desired product characteristic
Can supplement or validate traditional methods
Conclusion

26. Thank you for your time
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