Identifying customer pain points is taught as a necessary first step on the path to creating customer value in a product or a business. Several past entrepreneurs have identified pain points from being in the right place at the right time and launched successful businesses around the solution to those pains. Current effective systematic methods for finding pain points are time consuming and require high levels of experience for the researcher. To facilitate the innovation process, it is necessary to have an easy to implement, non-serendipitous method for systematically identifying customer pain points. This thesis will investigate and analyze two proposed methods in an effort to find a useable and effective way to find customer pain points. The two methods proposed are the listing method and the categorization method. The listing method shows a picture of a product and has participants list as many pains as they can with that product. The categorization method shows a picture of a product and has participants list as many pains as they can in categories that provoke them to consider both emotional and physical pains as well as the time period for when they happen, during use or after use. In a study of 138 participants, both methods generated large lists of pains with varying levels of detail. Categorization's responses had more personalized and more detailed responses than listing, which suggests that a more thought provoking exercise generates more thoughtful results. An independent product design firm rated the two methods for effectiveness in replacing data generated from a focus group and found both methods to have generated valuable, usable information for creating solutions to the pains derived.
展开▼
