Kano Model
The Kano Model captures customer preferences and expectations related to product attributes or functions. It offers insight into which attributes of a product are valued by customers and in which way, to assist with prioritisation, product development and increasing customer satisfaction. It also useful to predict when investments in some product areas may not necessarily increase customer satisfaction, as it can provide guidelines on what kind of work is likely to result in significant improvements.
In the Kano model, there are five categories of product qualities or functions. They differ based on how customers would feel if certain aspects would be fulfilled or not fulfilled by a product.
- Basic: Aspects that customers take for granted. When these aspects are done well, the customers are indifferent. When done badly or missing, the customers are dissatisfied.
- Performance: Competitive aspects that customers value. Customers appreciate them when fulfilled. When these functions are not present or fail to meet the expectations, the customers are dissatisfied.
- Exciters: Aspects that customers value when fulfilled, but do not cause dissatisfaction when not fulfilled.
- Indifferent: Aspects that do not bring satisfaction when present or dissatisfaction when missing.
- Dissatisfier: Complex aspects that might be valued by some customers but actually create dissatisfaction in other groups.
The model is named after Noriaki Kano, who introduced it in 1980s, with the goal of challenging the established notion that any improvements to key product areas are likely to increase customer satisfaction. For his work, Kano received the Deming Prize for individuals.
Alternative names for Kano model categories
Kano’s original work was in Japanese, and has been translated into English by many authors using different terminology. Some of the alternative names for different categories are:
- Basic: Must-be, minimum, flat, hygiene factors, threshold
- Performance: one-dimensional, performance, critical, key
- Exciters: delighting, attractive, motivator, satisfier, value-added
- Indifferent: low-impact, secondary, unimportant
- Dissatisfier: reverse
How to effectively make a Kano model?
It’s important to remember that the model tries to capture customer and user expectation, not the stakeholders or product manager’s view of those expectations. Do not try to fill in the categories yourself or by doing an internal research – go out and speak to your customers and users about that.
To facilitate the research, uncover customer preferences and categorise product aspects according to the Kano model, you can use a Kano Survey.
Kano Model Example
Using relatively generic customer expectations from mid-2020s, with abundant cheap cloud storage and professional consumers used to access content from multiple devices such as phones and laptops, an example of a Kano model categorisation for an note-taking application would be:
- Basic: Data persistence and integrity (customers would expect any changes to their notes to automatically be saved to their local device, and be available even in case of a device crashing due to battery running out or an accidental exit from the application). Unicode support for capturing notes in a local language (customers would not expect problems with missing font glyphs).
- Performance: Quick synchronization to other devices (For customers using the application on multiple devices concurrently, synchronization delays of a few seconds are probably acceptable. Delays measured in minutes would cause dissatisfaction. Almost real-time synchronization would be appreciated. In general, faster is better.) Search speed and accuracy, especially with lots of notes or very long notes (Searching should not take more than a few seconds, and only the matching entries should be shown so that a user can quickly overview them. Showing non-matching entries, missing matching entries or very slow search would cause dissatisfaction.)
- Exciters: Recovery from unwanted destructive actions by the user (for example, being able to go back in history and retrieve a part of a note that a user deleted, but later realised they still need).
- Indifferent: In the context of professional users, being able to set the background image to look like rustic paper or similar cosmetic changes.
- Dissatisfier: Unbundled pricing (e.g. asking the users to pay separately for different categories of storage, synchronization and functions). While some users might appreciate being able to get a cheaper price by only paying for the functions they need, others might be annoyed by constantly hitting limits and being asked to upgrade. A simple pricing scheme, potentially with a small number of tiers to allow different storage capacity, would be expected by most consumers used to similar applications on the market.
Using the Kano model to guide product development
A major benefit of using the model is to identify hidden basic functions and qualities (“must-be” in Kano’s terminology). A product lacking those functions may fail to even enter a market, without a clear understanding why that happened. Basic functions and qualities are thresholds the products need to achieve to even compete in a market. Such aspects need to be as good enough as in the competing products, but investing in further improvements beyond that would likely not produce any significant market improvements.
Performance functions and qualities are expected by customers and generally they reflect the key unique selling points or advantages of a product. Kano suggests that such attributes can often be found in the slogan of a company or a tag-line of a product. In general, the price a customer is willing to pay for a product is directly related to such performance attributes. In case of performance attributes, more is better, and customer satisfaction linearly increases with improvements.
Exciters are functions and aspects reflecting something that customers would value, but do not expect or know. They reflect the unknown needs, “awe effect” or “wow factor” in a product, and can bring significant competitive advantage. Assuming the basic needs are satisfied, investing in exciters can produce disproportionate increases in customer satisfaction.
Kano Model Limitations
The Kano model provides a snapshot of current customer expectations and the results are generally valid just in the short to medium term. An important aspect of the Kano model is that the classification of system attributes changes over time. What was once exciting becomes normal and expected. Exciters transition to performance attributes, and performance attributes transition to basic needs.
One important aspect that is not covered by the Kano model is when performance and exciter aspects surpass the ability of the market to notice or consume further improvements. At some point, more is no longer better, as the customers will not notice any significant change to their work. The QUPER model breakpoints can be used to complement Kano model analysis and establish when performance enhancements start to bring diminishing returns.
Learn more about the Kano Model
- Attractive quality and must-be quality, Journal of the Japanese Society for Quality Control ISSN 03868230 by Kano Noriaki, Nobuhiku Seraku, Fumio Takahashi, Shinichi Tsuji (April 1984)