In today’s competitive marketplace, customer requirements (CRs) analysis is critically important in the development phase of a new product. One widely used effective tool for CRs analysis is Kano’s model. However, this model only considers crisp descriptions, ignoring the fact that CRs are imprecise and uncertain due to their linguistic origins. Moreover, it provides limited decision support for designers because it is a qualitative method based on discontinuous classification criteria. To tackle these problems, this paper proposes a continuous fuzzy Kano’s model to more accurately analyse CRs. A modified fuzzy Kano’s questionnaire is developed to deal with the imprecision and uncertainty in CRs. It is a self-administered paper questionnaire that consists of closed-ended questions. Furthermore, a continuous approach for fuzzy Kano evaluation is presented to quantitatively analyse CRs. Also, an evaluation index is introduced that allows CRs to be prioritized. A case study of mobile phone development is presented to evaluate the proposed method.

Customer requirements analysis is of critical importance in design for mass customization. The present paper investigates two important issues in customer requirements analysis. The first is clustering for the customer requirements and the product features (functional requirements), and the consistency analysis approach is applied to link customer groups with clusters of product features. The second issue concerns trends analysis of dynamic customer requirements and functional requirements on the basis of consistency analysis of customer groups and product feature clusters. A novel methodology integrating popular clustering techniques (such as fuzzy clustering and rough set) and grey theory is proposed for accomplishing the two tasks. It focuses on customer group based knowledge of customer requirements from the transaction records. This is used to provide decision support for product development by analysing historical data. A case study is presented to illustrate the proposed method.