Prioritizing features

When you know what categories your product features are in, you can make a decision about what features to tackle first and how. Must-Be features are obviously features your product needs, for example.

But it's not that easy. What do you do when several features are Must-Be features? Should you really ignore Indifferent features? What about features that don't belong to one category?

There are different ways of prioritizing features based on the results of your Kano survey. But you must remember that interpreting your Kano study requires the same customer-centric mindset as designing it.

Yes, the study’s outcome will be quantifiable, but understanding why things are what they are is as important. A Kano study is as much of an art as it is a science. That's why I prefer doing live surveys with less people than mass online surveys with people that I can't talk to.

Although you will find examples of complicated calculation methods later on this chapter, I recommend sticking to two methods: category ranking (a feature's "category strength") and a simple calculation to determine the impact of a feature's presence and absence on customer satisfaction ("better-worse"). In his literature review, Löfgren (2008) agrees:

"For the analysis of the data the authors suggest that companies [...] conduct statistical tests together with usage of the different measures that have been introduced, such as category strength, total strength, and better and worse. The better-worse diagram, in particular, has proven to be useful in communicating and providing an understanding of the results"