Abstract

Under the background of the economic globalization, customer requirements play an increasingly important role today in almost every industry. Achieving customer satisfaction becomes the key way for a company to win market shares in the intensive global competitions. In this thesis, a four phase QFD-oriented product design framework is proposed by integrating Quality Function Deployment (QFD) with 3 different design methodologies (Environment-Based Design, Analytic Hierarchy Process, Axiomatic Design), to systematically guide product design from the planning phase to the detail design phase, and to build the link between design variables in different phases, so that it is known how customer requirements are met during each development phase, and till the end, customer requirements and product characteristics are clearly linked together. Apart from the theoretical side, a web application design case study is presented to illustrate how this framework is applied. In the case study, customer requirements are successfully captured and mapped down to the detail design level.