A Design Approach (QFD)

Quality Function Deployment transforms customer needs into engineering characteristics for a product or service.

Quality Function Deployment is created to help designer hone in on the characteristics of a new or existing products. This is  is from the viewpoints of market segments, coorporate or technology -development needs.
The House of Quality (HOQ) is one of the aspects of QFD and can be complex in nature but will allow designer to more accurately weigh risks of engineering characteristics vs customer requirements.




The above picture is a simple schematic of the HoQ.

• The what represents the voice of the customer, which are the things they require.
• The importance is the scale to help consider customer trade offs.
•  The how is the voice of the engineer and represents the engineering specifications.
• How vs. How is the interactions between the how's. Used to help manage trade off and change propagation.
• How much is the quantity targets for the engineers how. (Engineering specs must be measurable)
• The now is the competition and how well they do satisfying customer requirements.
• The now vs how is the us vs them section and how well you fair against the current competition
  (reveals oppurtunity to gain advantage and is also known as "benchmarking."
• The what vs how identifies the relationships between the what and how and helps focus the goals of the designer.
  

More complex layouts are being used like the one below: