SigmaExacta

In the fast-paced world of product development and user experience, understanding what truly matters to the customer is the key to success. Not all features are created equal, and this is where a powerful and insightful tool comes into play: the Kano Model . Dr. Noriaki Kano: The Origin of a Revolutionary Idea To understand the Kano Model, we must first know its creator: Dr. Noriaki Kano . Born in 1940, Kano is a renowned professor of quality management at Tokyo University of Science. In the 1980s, while researching the drivers of customer satisfaction and loyalty, Dr. Kano challenged the traditional belief that improving every feature would proportionally increase satisfaction. His in-depth research revealed a non-linear relationship between product functionality and customer emotional response. It was this revelation that led him to develop a model that classifies product attributes into distinct categories, forever changing how we think about quality and user experience. History and...

Forget brainstorming and blue-sky thinking sessions. True innovation in reliability doesn't come from sudden inspiration, but from a disciplined process of structured pessimism. It's a technique that forces engineers to become their own fiercest critics, to methodically imagine every way their creation could possibly fail. This method is Failure Mode and Effects Analysis (FMEA), and its journey from military procedures to modern web tools has transformed how the world builds safe and dependable products. Military Origins: A Cold War Necessity The story of FMEA begins in the crucible of post-war military technology. In the late 1940s, the U.S. military faced a critical problem: its increasingly complex equipment was failing at an alarming rate. Reliability wasn't a luxury; it was a strategic necessity. In response, a formalized procedure was developed, documented in military standard  MIL-P-1629 . For the first time, engineers had a systematic method to ask three fundamental...