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.
The basic assumption of the Kano model is that implementing different features impacts user satisfaction in different ways. For some features this relationship is linear (more is proportionally better), and for some it’s asymmetric and non-linear. Understanding this relationship can help to guide how much to invest in which feature type.
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.
Applicability
The Kano model can be used to classify different types of features and help decide on how much to invest in them, including hidden basic functions and qualities, the key performance functions that the customers are willing to pay for, and “awe effect” or “wow factor” functions.
Chris Chapman and Mario Callegaro suggest that the nice thing about the Kano model is that it puts features on a “two-dimensional landscape that is excellent for framing discussions with product managers, executives and the like”, at the same time pointing out systematic issues with validity and reliability of Kano Surveys, and that the “theory behind the Kano scores is dubious and has little empirical support”, suggesting that the resulting data from surveys isn’t particularly trustworthy.
As such, the Kano model is best used as a basis for a discussion, not as a way to directly make important product decisions.
History
The original model was published in Attractive quality and must-be quality, by Kano and colleagues in 1984.
Chapman and Callegaro claim that Kano was inspired by two-factor theory describing workplace motivation by Frederick Herzberg, from 1959.
A two-dimensional relationship of performance and customer satisfaction, inspired by Herzberg’s work, was also explored by Swan and Combs in 1976. Feng-Han Lin and colleagues suggest in Empirical Research on Kano’s Model and Customer Satisfaction that this was one of the influences on Kano’s work.
Kano categories
In the Kano model, there are three main categories of product qualities or functions, and three additional categories.
The main categories are:
- Must-be: 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. Increasing the implementation level of product features in this class will not, in itself, increase user satisfaction.
- One-dimensional: reflecting competitive product 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. Features in this category a linear relationship with user satisfaction. The more the feature is implemented, the more satisfied the users become.
- Attractive: Aspects that customers value when fulfilled, but do not cause dissatisfaction when not fulfilled. Such features are not expected, but their presence can greatly increase user satisfaction.
The additional classes are:
- Indifferent: the presence or absence of a feature does not affect user satisfaction
- Reverse: features whose presence decreases user satisfaction
- Questionable: features where they users indicated conflicting answers, where the users would prefer the feature both to be present and not to be present
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, so there are many competing naming systems for the Kano categories. Here are some of the most popular alternatives:
- Must-be: basic, minimum, flat, hygiene factors, threshold
- One-dimensional: performance, critical, key
- Attractive: exciter, delighter, motivator, satisfier, value-added
- Indifferent: low-impact, secondary, unimportant
- Reverse: dissatisfier
An example of Kano Model categorization
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:
- Must-Be: 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).
- One-Dimensional: 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.)
- Attractive: 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.
- Reverse: 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.
How to effectively make a Kano model?
A typical way to construct the Kano model is using a qualitative Kano Survey. It’s important to remember that the model tries to capture customer and user expectations, 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.
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.
There are no statistically valid methods for quantitative analysis of Kano Surveys. Although several popular scoring schemes exist, they do not necessarily provide strong statistical evidence. Chris Chapman and Mario Callegaro suggest that a Kano Model tells “a compelling story”, but it may not be possible to know if the story is true.
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)
- Kano Analysis: A Critical Survey Science Review, Proceedings of the 2022 Sawtooth Software Conference by C Chapman, M Callegaro (May 2022)
- Empirical Research on Kano's Model and Customer Satisfaction by Feng-Han Lin, Sang-Bing Tsai, Yu-Cheng Lee, Cheng-Fu Hsiao, Jie Zhou, Jiangtao Wang, Zhiwen Shang (2017)