User-experience Based Product Development for Mass Personalization: A Case Study

Nowadays, with the rapid development of information technologies (e.g. web 2.0, cloud computing and virtual reality) and manufacturing technologies (e.g. additive manufacturing), users become more actively involved in the product development stage to create personalized products with higher efficiency. This emerging manufacturing paradigm is known as mass personalization, of which user experience (e.g. emotional factors and product utility), co-creation (e.g. user participation), and product change (e.g. modular design) are regarded as three key characteristics. In previous studies, researchers often treat each characteristic separately with an illustrative example to demonstrate its significant effect respectively. They, however, cannot fully reflect the product development process for mass personalization, and may cause inconsistency in implementing the existing methods into real cases. To fill the gap, this work proposes a three-model based (i.e. physical model, cyber model and user experience model) generic framework for conducting user experience based product development for mass personalization. A case study of a personalized smart wearable product development is described, of which the three key characteristics are considered collectively. It can also be seen as a typical case integrating the frontier techniques to enable mass personalization. The authors hope this work can provide some useful guidance to product designers and engineer-to-order companies.