Wordings of the Kano Model's Questionnaire

Abstract

Purpose: The Kano model has been widely accepted as a method for classifying quality attributes for almost three decades since its introduction. However, the wordings of the five alternatives in the Kano's questionnaire has been criticised for unclear and confusable meanings. New wordings of the five alternatives are proposed in this paper. Methods: To evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed wordings, we classify 30 quality attributes of smart-phones using the conventional wordings and the proposed wordings respectively. The two classification results are compared with the direct classification results by undergraduate students who learned the Kano model. Results: The classification results using the proposed wordings are much more consistent with the direct classification results than those using the conventional wordings. Conclusion: The proposed wordings are less confusable and easy to understand, and thus it results in more consistent with the direct classification.