Customer needs are considered as being quite remarkable information in product design. The elaborate fulfillment of them in the design solution is closely related to the success of a product. They, however, are generally collected and presented by marketers. Consequently those needs are difficult for designers to understand and therefore might not get fulfilled in the final prpduct design.
Here the goal of this study is set that the process of design information elicitation based on customer needs is developed as a guideline of utilizing them in design activity in effective manners.
Major findings of this study can be summarized as follows:
First, customer needs are expected to get interpreted into the designer- oriented language in the aspects of function and image of a product. Those interpreted needs play a role as a base for concept establishment and the development of it with the help of various techniques from the field of statistics and systematic product development.
Second, designer-orient manner of understanding customer needs requires designers to take parts in from collecting to interpreting them for better design solution that fulfills them, which brings up a necessity that available techniques shouldn't be beyond understanding of designers and for the styling activity customer needs of image aspect should be interpreted and presented visually. In this study, those visual information is presented through the image maps and image information sheet. It is image information sheet that is suggested to contain visual and verbal information altogether such as the overall and major elements images expressing a specific image need and the correlation between them showing how much the element image contributes to building the overall image.