Empirically derived heuristics to assist designers with satisfying consumer variation in product design

With markets becoming increasingly heterogeneous, design firms have strived to develop solutions to address the variation between consumers. This has led to the development of different design methodologies and tools, handling tasks from scoping of the problem to assisting with individual design steps. However, a limited amount of work has been done in identifying heuristics that can be used by designers to facilitate identifying viable concepts to meet different types of consumer variation. This work examines a range of product categories and individual products to identify how different types of consumer variation are addressed. Heuristics are then developed by examining the correlations between the solution and variation. Further, consumer variation that is not addressed is noted as well. These heuristics are intended to be used in the early stages of design to assist designers with the problem of addressing consumer variation.