Designer-moderated product design

A well-designed product can provide a firm with a competitive advantage that will enable it to achieve a higher market share and increased profits. Conjoint analysis procedures are often used for product design. Numerous methods have been developed to take conjoint data and produce optimal or near-optimal product designs. But conjoint analysis, while significantly contributing to the product design process, still has the limitation of designing a product based only on input from the consumer. Under certain circumstances, designer preferences are an important source of expertise that needs to supplement consumer preferences in the product design problem. This research proposes a unique way of designing products using the distinct and parallel opinions from both the consumer and the designer, a concept the authors call designer-moderated product design. This paper: (1) makes a case for using designer as well as consumer preferences; (2) formulates a share-of-choices model for designer-moderated product designs; (3) develops and evaluates a heuristic to solve the problem using genetic algorithm techniques; and (4) presents a real application of the model and the heuristic.