UNDERSTANDING USERS AND PRODUCTS IN PRODUCT DEVELOPMENT: THE APPLICATION OF PRODUCT USAGE INFORMATION AND ITS CHALLENGES

The need to understand users and products is one of the cores for product success. There are many ways to reach this understanding,such as,interviews and consumer cocreation. This study put a focus on the application of product usage information (PUI). Although amount of product-related information is available in the middle of a product's life, producers have not realized the full potential of these data in product development. The academic literature describes various use cases that outline how PUI supports this kind of understanding, and eventually benefits product development. Each of them provides fragmented information from certain perspectives. This diversity and the lack of systematic overview facilitates a fragmentation in the research of PUI usage in product development. To have an initial and unified overview of PUI's value on the understanding of users and products, this paper conducted a combination of systematic and descriptive review to form a sample with 12 papers. The result indicates that PUI increases producer's understanding about the product, its users and the context of usage. However, producers need to address several challenges if they want to apply PUI in product development successfully.