Towards Understanding the Role of Product Usage Information in Product Design Improvement

A critical factor that makes a product successful is its acceptance in its market. To achieve this goal, producers oftentimes collect and analyze feedback information from the market. This information allows them to get a deeper understanding about the product behaviors, customers, their usage patterns, future needs and expectations. The academic literature describes a variety of use cases that outline how development-related tasks can benefit from Product Usage Information (PUI). They differ, for instance, in the investigated product, task, communication channel, information source, and the type of the result. This diversity and the lack of a generally agreed vocabulary in this research domain facilitates a fragmentation of PUI-related research. This paper provides a first systematic overview of a selection of PUI application cases in product design improvement. The study sample consists of 17 research papers from the last 20 years. We characterize and classify the papers mainly through three dimensions: product type, product development phase, and information sources and channels. The results indicate that PUI can support different tasks during product improvement, both in the task clarification phase and in the product conceptual, embodiment and detailed design phases. Our findings suggest that organizations need to know more about PUI-related information sources and channels.