Modeling Product Feature Usability through Web Mining

As technology advances, it becomes more feasible to develop products with many features, each of which individually might be perceived as useful. But after products are used for a certain period, consumers may not think so and have many complaints about some product features with a low level of usability. In order to make product feature design achieve much consumer satisfaction, correlating the satisfaction to and evaluating the usability of product features are of great importance in product development. To get useful design knowledge, we propose a novel product feature usability model (PFUM) to identify the critical features in product development. In order to work out an effective model in practice and obtain data from target consumer group, a Web-mining based software system is developed. Then a systematic approach is formed to guide product feature usability analysis. Finally a 3G mobile phone case is studied at last using the Web-mining based product feature usability model.