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If smart watches are going to really take off, they’ll have to get a lot better-looking first.
The market for smart watches is hopping, with companies large (Samsung, Sony) and small (Pebble) betting consumers want to strap these gadgets to their wrists. Even Apple and Google are expected to be readying their takes, and market researcher Juniper Research expects wearable-tech revenue to grow to $19 billion by 2018 from this year’s comparatively paltry $1.4 billion.
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There are extremists in every religion.
You will find Hindu extremists in the Indian subcontinent, Jewish extremists in the Middle East and high profile Islamic extremists in Africa, Asia and elsewhere.
But what about Christian extremists?
In the United States, a movement fitting that description called “Christian Dominionism” has recently been making a name for itself.
What is “Dominionism”, you ask?
This is the belief that Christians were provided the God-given right to control all “earthy institutions until the second coming of Jesus”. One of the more prominent branches, Christian Reconstructionists, believe the laws of the Bible should replace secular laws. ( Sounds vaguely “Sharia-esque”).
What about separation of church and state? Not in their book.
Though no US politicians explicitly identify themselves as “Dominionists”, that hasn’t stopped its influence in politics. This recent Dominionism emergence started in 2011 when ties between a Dominionist group and GOP candidates Rick Perry and Michele Bachmann were revealed.
Some are pointing out links between Dominionism and the recent government shutdown.
Republican Senator Ted Cruz of Texas is the son of Rafael Cruz, a Texas pastor who directs Purifying Fire Ministries and is involved with a movement to involve conservative Christians in politics. Cruz has preached to his followers:
“God has given you an anointing to go to the battlefield. And what’s the battlefield? The marketplace. To go to the marketplace and occupy the land. To go to the marketplace and take dominion.”
Now we don’t know, nor can we assume Senator Cruz is like his father, but Rafael is very popular within the Tea Party. Heritage Action for America, an organization whose stances are closely watched by conservatives, flies Rafael around to give speeches.
Many people are scared of this movement emerging in politics, especially with the power the Tea Party had in the recent shutdown.
Is it foolish for people to think that the Dominionist’s view of a theocratic government in the USA could ever become a reality?
Or is there going to be hell to pay?
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Every product maker that I know wants to create products that delight their customers, yet not every product does this. Why? Products are often less than delightful for a number of reasons, but a common one is that the product simply doesn’t do the necessary things to meet a particular person’s expectations. One way to attempt to solve this issue is to build as many features as you can, hoping that one sticks and results in satisfied customers. Another approach is to prioritize features based on the expected impact on customer satisfaction.
Intuitively, we know that each feature has a different impact on customer satisfaction, but often we do not put this intuition into practice — again, falling back to a build everything approach. It is often helpful to have a framework or model for how to guide our thinking and practice. The Kano model provides one way of thinking about features and their associated impact on customer satisfaction.
The Kano model, developed in the 1980s by Professor Noriaki Kano, assumes that not all features affect customer satisfaction equally and models the differing impacts by categorizing features into one of three main buckets: threshold, performance, and excitement. Before defining each of the categories, it is helpful to look at the graph of the Kano model. The y axis is customer satisfaction, and the x axis is feature implementation.
Threshold features are the baseline features of a product. From a customer’s perspective, they are either present or not and have a binary effect on satisfaction. Consider a toilet: would you say that a bathroom is complete without one? Probably not. You’d be mighty disappointed to find a bathroom without a toilet; the bathroom would not be viable as a bathroom.
Performance features are ones that a customer will be increasingly satisfied the better you implement them. These are the features that can have a metric next to them: battery life, download speed, megapixels, storage space, etc. Competitors often fight fiercely over these features.
Excitement features are, well, the most exciting features as a product maker. They delight a customer in an unexpected way; customers would have zero negative impact to their satisfaction if excitement features are absent. But, these are often what make a product unique from its competitors and contribute 100% to positive customer satisfaction. Remember smartphones before multitouch? Laptops before solid state drives?
One interesting aspect of the Kano model is that features that are excitement today tend to drift down to becoming threshold features. Multitouch screens in smartphones are an example of this trend. When the iPhone launched, this was absolutely an excitement feature; now, it is a threshold feature of a cell phone (or arguably a performance feature for some customers).
You might be wondering if there is a method for figuring out which category a particular feature belongs to. One way is to use your product instinct and expertise of the problem you’re solving to put features into different categories; however, if you have access to potential or existing customers, another way is to ask people the following two questions for each potential feature, one for positive emotion and one for negative:
The possible answers to each question are:
Based on the responses, a simple table can be produced that helps categorize the features:
The orange, green, and yellow match with excitement, performance, and threshold respectively; the grey area represents features that a customer is indifferent about, and the red area represents features that would contribute to the customer’s dissatisfaction if implemented (stay away from these!). The question mark cells represent an undeterminable result from the responses.
Now that you have your features categorized, you have a framework for thinking about how to prioritize those features.
Why care about prioritizing customer satisfaction? Satisfied customers are happy customers, and happy customers are loyal customers. Loyal customers are the lifeblood of any successful product. The Kano model is not a foolproof method but is a simple tool for helping build more satisfying products.
Go, make your customers happy.
The post The Kano Model appeared first on Treehouse Blog.
]]>Please join us in congratulating Pulanda (Polly) Muangrat. Polly is a CWIT Affiliate and IS major. This summer she was the proud recipient of the first Advertising.com Scholarship.