Kano Model & Sustainability-Smart Design Thinking

The Kano Model is an analysis method to categorize the features of a product and evaluate them in terms of customer impression and satisfaction in relation to the effort to insert those features. I heard about it originally from Rory Sutherland.

The basic idea is that there are critical features that you must get right and there are other features you need help deciding on including otherwise you might never deliver the product. The category buckets (according to Wikipedia) include:

Must-be Quality -> un-noticed when present, noticed when absent!
One-dimensional Quality -> if it’s there and I notice it, it could make me really happy or it could make me really mad (if poorly implemented).
Attractive Quality -> if it’s there and I notice it, it could make me really happy but it probably would not make me un-happy if it was poorly implemented.
Indifferent Quality -> things that usually go un-noticed by most people.
Reverse Quality -> things that, if overdone, could cause dissatisfaction.

It’s interesting to ponder on the application of the Kano Model to Sustainability-Smart Design Thinking. I use the term “Smart” here to push the oblique method of including sustainability features. Depending on the Kano Model category that a sustainable product feature falls into, the angle of obliqueness can vary.

For YCISL, we could develop an exercise where we design think a sustainable product with its feature list then tune the presentation of each feature in various oblique ways that optimize user satisfaction – especially the OOBE/first impression of the early adopter. In a way, if un-desirable but necessary features are present, a viable strategy may be to make it oblique such that it becomes an “Indifferent Quality” whereas it might be a “Reverse Quality” when fully frontal.

I don’t enough experience applying the Kano Model so the application to sustainability design thinking is pretty thin here. But it is another tool that could help a product designer tune their feature list and exercise creativity in doing so.