On Relating Online Reviews to Quality Function Deployment in Engineering Design

The rapid development of WWW, information technology and e-commerce has made the Internet forums, e-opinion portals and personal blogs widely accessible to consumers. As a result, nowadays it has become extremely popular for consumers to share their experience, point out their preferences and concerns with respect to some products on Web. As a matter of fact, these online customer reviews possess vital information that product designers can gain insights about their customers as well as products by analyzing such comments, and eventually, improve their products accordingly. Furthermore, these reviews indeed often guide the potential consumers in their purchase decision making. Therefore, it has become an urgent task to help designers in processing and taking advantage of such reviews. Although the Web does provide a rich resource of consumer opinions, the sheer amount of data, their distributed locations and the inherent ambiguity of human language have made this a nontrivial task to designers. In this proposed research project, we aim to provide an intelligent system that is able to automatically gather global online reviews with respect to certain products interested, identify the product features and customer opinions, and relate them to the product’s engineering characteristics through Quality Function Deployment, a tool that is widely used by product designers in translating customer requirements into appropriate technical requirements in the customer-driven design paradigm. As a pioneer study, it’s our belief that this research will greatly help designers in the era of information overload, globalization and e-commerce.