Proposal and validation of statement interpretation guidelines (with experience, as designer, with empathy) for discovering latent needs from interview responses

Abstract

Latent needs are defined as "those that many customers recognize as important but cannot be clearly articulate in advance". Latent needs are the subject of numerous surveys conducted to find new ideas, but the circumstances and elements that can produce the hidden requirements are not known. In our research, we conducted interviews after introducing a working prototype of a childcare device. The responses in the interview were then interpreted based on the guideline commonly used by other designers. Then, as we assumed that experience, empathy, and knowledge of working prototype is essential elements in product development, the new additional guidelines which are "to write a statement with empathy", "to write a statement as a designer", and "to write a statement as someone with experience" were proposed to see whether these new guidelines will influence the process of identifying latent needs. From the research result, we were able to conclude that the number of interpreted needs increased when we additionally applied the new proposed guideline. Although the number of increased needs is small, the needs might not be interpreted if the new guidelines were not considered. We also discovered that the interpreted needs of newly proposed guidelines obtain high scores with our quantitative evaluation method of interpreted needs. We could conclude that including these guidelines upon interpreting raw data from consumer interviews might lead to discovering important and critical latent needs of the consumers.