A Customer-Based Expected Utility Metric for Product Design Selection

The ability to select a design alternative, from a set of feasible alternatives, that is likely to meet customers’ and designer’s preferences and also account for uncertainties is vital to the success of a product design process. This paper presents a new metric, a Customer-based Expected Utility (CEU) metric, for product design selection that accounts for a range of attribute levels (i.e., the customer range) within which customers make purchase decisions. The metric also accounts for designer’s preferences and uncertainty in achieving a desired attribute level (or a combination of attribute levels). The application of the CEU metric is demonstrated by rank-ordering a set of design alternatives for a cordless power tool. Using this metric, design alternatives that fall outside the customer range will yield a relatively low CEU value, while among those that fall in the customer range, the alternatives with a higher value of the designer’s utility yield a higher value of the CEU metric.