抄録
Understanding latent demands and incorporating them into product functionality are crucial steps in the product development process. "Those that many customers identify as significant but cannot be adequately articulated in advance" is how latent demands are described. Latent needs are the subject of numerous surveys conducted to find new ideas, but the circumstances and elements that can produce latent requirements are not known. Additionally, it is difficult to identify latent needs from consumer wants using quantitative analysis. The purpose of this research is to verify the method in the elicitation of latent needs from consumer needs by introducing directly the working prototype to the consumers, conducting interviews, and collecting responses from the consumer after they touched and observed the working prototype directly and the results from conducting the research with a focused working prototype of a childcare device with the “preventing entry into dangerous areas” function was presented in this paper. The interpreted needs that obtained high scores of the Degree of Latent Needs (DLN) which is our proposed quantitative evaluation method for identifying latent needs from product function are “The device can emit light from its eye” and “The device can change the facial expression”. In addition, a method for investigating the effectiveness of the quantitative evaluation method was evaluated by applying the Anderson-Darling test. The results indicated that the DLN values of the needs translated from the working prototype of the “preventing entry into dangerous areas” function did not follow a normal distribution, however our previously interpreted needs from comprehensive working prototype interviews follow a normal distribution. Therefore, we are able to say that our evaluation method using DLN could be applied to calculate and assist in evaluating important latent needs.
