C-Kano model: a novel approach for discovering attractive quality elements

The theory of attractive quality (the Kano model) can offer a better understanding of how customers evaluate products, and helps practitioners to focus on the most important quality attributes to improve. However, in practice, users of the Kano model usually cannot find an attractive or one-dimensional quality element due to an improperly-designed questionnaire, poorly-defined quality attributes or lifecycle of quality attributes. Kano also indicated that attractive quality creation to bring a must-be product back to an attractive product is a tough task. To solve these issues, this study proposed a novel Creativity-based Kano model (C-Kano model) which integrates the creativity techniques, TRIZ and SCAMPER, into the traditional Kano model. The proposed C-Kano model not only discovers customer needs, but also creates attractive quality elements. In this study, an actual quality survey of Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game (MMORPG) was used to evaluate the effectiveness of the C-Kano model. Compared with the traditional Kano model, the experimental results show that our proposed model is superior in discovering attractive quality elements.