"Principles for User Design of Customized Products"

Taylor Randall, Christian Terwiesch, and Karl Ulrich

California Management Review

Summer 2005, pp. 68-85

This article defines user design as "a particular form of product customization that allows the user to specify the properties of that product." User design has the potential to allow the customer to specify exactly what they want, and for the seller to provide complete customer satisfaction.

Five principles of effective customer design, and their related action steps are:

• Customize the customization process, because some customers have more knowledge about the product than others do. Action steps are:
  • Provide novice consumers with a needs-based interface
  • Provide expert users with a parameter-based interface
• Provide starting points, because not all consumers are interested in fully exploiting the potential of customization. The action step is to provide multiple access points for customization.
• Support incremental refinement, because customizing one's own product is difficult and requires many iterations. Action steps are:
  • Allow consumers to bookmark their design in process
  • Allow for side-by-side comparison
  • Provide short-cuts through "attribute space"
• Exploit prototypes to avoid surprises, because typically a user-design customer must order a product before seeing it or testing it. Action steps are:
  • Provide rich illustrations of the product
  • Provide increasing levels of fidelity in prototypes as the customization process progresses
• Teach the consumer, because many consumers know very little about the options available. Action steps are:
  • Provide "help buttons" leading to meaningful information
  • Explain the product attributes and how they map to design parameters
  • Show the distribution of design parameters and product attributes across the consumer population

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