Optimal Balancing of Product Design Features: A Case Study on Mobile Phones

The design process to make a product that appeals to consumers should consider their various preferences (e.g. user satisfaction dimensions) simultaneously. That is, a key problem in product design is to select a set of optimal design values that would result in a product satisfying the various user satisfaction dimensions. This is one of the optimal balancing problems. However, it is very difficult for product designers to solve this optimal balancing problem in a quantitative manner. This study suggests a systematic method for solving these problems based on the multiple response surface (MRS) methodology and demonstrates the applicability of the proposed method through a case study on mobile phones. Three different optimal design settings for a total of 31 mobile phone design variables were analyzed and validated based on an optimization performance test and similarity test.