What is the kano model?

The Kano Model (pronounced “Kah-no”) is a method of ranking items on a product roadmap according to their likelihood of satisfying consumers.

The History Of The Kano Model

Professor Noriaki Kano invented the Kano Model in 1984, and it has been in use ever since. He worked as a quality management professor at the Tokyo University of Science, where he specialized in the field.

Professor Kano was motivated to build the model while studying the elements that influence how good products delight customers and maintain their loyalty to the brand.

Professor Kano, in essence, developed a framework for evaluating features based on their ability to satisfy or delight people. Each of Professor Kano’s five prioritizing categories will be represented by the two metrics.

The Importance of The Kano Model

A product team’s ability to commit appropriate resources and time to develop a product’s most important assets is enhanced by measuring and prioritizing critical features through customer satisfaction surveys.

The Kano Model contains both fundamental and advanced product characteristics. Teams can utilize the Kano Model to build products that meet the demands of their users and offer them long-term value over time.

The kano model can distinguish a good product with moderate sales from a truly remarkable one at the forefront of a particular market segment.

What is the Kano Model, and how does it work?

Product teams who use the Kano Model in the development of a new product or the upgrade of an existing product classify features into the five categories listed below:

Basic

The characteristics that fit within this category are those that clients expect from all products of the same type. Although not especially pleasing to users, these characteristics are necessary for the product’s primary function, and if they are absent from a product’s design, customer satisfaction ratings could plummet substantially.

Performance/Satisfiers

These features reflect a product team’s dedication to providing more capability than is provided by the basic suite. They contribute to the whole experience and can assist one product in gaining a slight competitive advantage over another. However, this is unlikely to be a deal-breaker in most cases.

Excitement/delighters

When it comes to client purchasing decisions and user satisfaction, features in this category can make a significant difference. Excitement attributes/delighters can differentiate a product from its competitors and provide it with a competitive advantage.

They have the potential to persuade a consumer to become and remain loyal to a brand over the years, even if the quality of the following items decreases. Customer delighters may convert consumers into brand advocates and inspire them to post great reviews online, encouraging new customers to try the product.

Indifferent characteristics

Any feature considered ‘indifferent’ has no direct positive or negative influence on the users who utilize it. They may find it difficult to determine if the feature’s existence boosts or diminishes their levels of enjoyment.

Attributes in the opposite direction

Users are actively dissatisfied with the features in this category, and you should remove them from the product altogether. They have the potential to lead users to feel frustrated with a product and even seek alternatives if there are a sufficient number of them available.

Placing features into any of these categories allows product teams to identify which parts are the most critical in developing a product — and which ones can be discarded entirely. However, it should not be decided solely based on the product team’s opinion.

So – how do you make that decision?

●     Product teams should use user research to acquire information as well. They might create a survey targeted to each of the features included in a product and distribute it to users within the target demographic(s) to gather feedback on how well the elements work in their daily lives.

●     Your company can use many other methods to demonstrate the features by the teams. Creating an interactive wireframe or a more advanced prototype may be possible, though it is critical to avoid devoting too much work to any particular demo model. The most important goal is to communicate the function of the feature and how it assists users in achieving their objectives.

●     Users’ responses to the surveys should determine how valuable each feature is to them and how they would feel if it were left in or removed from the final product. Participants must be drawn solely from the target audience to provide the most accurate and valuable input.

●     Using standard responses provided in Kano Model surveys, researchers can determine whether a user ‘loved’ some aspect of the product or service, if they “expected it,” whether they “felt neutral,” whether they “tolerated it,” whether they “dislike,” and whether they “anticipated” the product or service. Product teams can assess the wide range of replies when bringing a product to market and identify which features are most likely to satisfy customers.

When should teams employ the Kano Model, and when shouldn’t they?

According to its creators, product teams can use the Kano Model to produce any type of product. Those teams working under strict time constraints and with little resources, on the other hand, tend to get the most benefits from using it. There is no time to waste in such situations: every minute, every hour, and every dollar counts.

Investing in features that will ultimately leave people dissatisfied, or worse, driving them away to a competitor, is a significant waste of time and resources.

The Kano Model can also be highly beneficial to teams working on a specific type of product for the first time or for groups that have little overall experience.

The Kano Model is intended to provide helpful direction by highlighting which features must be included in the build and why prioritization appears to be a natural process by making it feel like it is

.

Finally, the Kano Model might benefit teams that want to expose an MVP (Minimum Viable Product) to the market as quickly as feasible after developing it. Their investigation can continue, possibly adding more satisfying or delightful ingredients down the road.

Conclusion

According to the Kano Model, the essential elements of a product are determined by the level of happiness they are predicted to provide to users. When developing a consequence, the Kano Model identifies the most critical features.