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Communication and information technologies are adding new capabilities for rapid and
inexpensive customer input to all stages of the product development (PD) process. In this article
we review six web-based methods of customer input as examples of the improved Internet capabilities
of communication, conceptualization, and computation. For each method we give examples
of user-interfaces, initial applications, and validity tests. We critique the applicability of the
methods for use in the various stages of PD and discuss how they complement existing methods.
For example, during the fuzzy front end of PD the information pump enables customers
to interact with each other in a web-based game that provides incentives for truth-telling and
thinking hard, thus providing new ways for customers to verbalize the product features that are
important to them. Fast polyhedral adaptive conjoint estimation enables PD teams to screen larger
numbers of product features inexpensively to identify and measure the importance of the
most promising features for further development. Meanwhile, interactive web-based conjoint
analysis interfaces are moving this proven set of methods to the web while exploiting new capabilities
to present products, features, product use, and marketing elements in streaming multimedia
representations. User design exploits the interactivity of the web to enable users to design
their own virtual products thus enabling the PD team to understand complex feature interactions
and enabling customers to learn their own preferences for new products. These methods can be
valuable for identifying opportunities, improving the design and engineering of products, and
testing ideas and concepts much earlier in the process when less time and money is at risk. As
products move toward pretesting and testing, virtual concept testing on the web enables PD
teams to test concepts without actually building the product. Further, by combining virtual concepts
and the ability of customers to interact with one another in a stock-market-like game, securities
trading of concepts provides a novel way to identify winning concepts.
Prototypes of all six methods are available and have been tested with real products and
real customers. These tests demonstrate reliability for web-based conjoint analysis, polyhedral
methods, virtual concept testing, and stock-market-like trading; external validity for web-based
conjoint analysis and polyhedral methods; and consistency for web-based conjoint analysis vs.
user design. We report on these tests, commercial applications, and other evaluations. |
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