Ergonomics-based Kansei Engineering and Kano Model for Public Services Excellence

Emotion is found to be stronger than cognition in human and system interaction. Kansei Engineering has been extensively used to capture customer emotions and translate them into product characteristics since 1980s. Ergonomics in Kansei Engineering is dealing with user and customer capability and limitation in terms of emotional aspects. Customer emotion and expression resulted from both products and services interaction. However, research of Kansei Engineering in services is still relatively less explored. Since service industries are growing significantly as one of the contributors for today’s economy, it is a calling for ergonomics-based Kansei Engineering methodology in understanding, modeling and fulfilling what the emotional needs as a function of service attributes. In this study, Kano model has been proposed to Kansei Engineering methodology as a quality tool in screening which service attributes are sensitive to emotional satisfaction, so that more focused-improvements on services are highly expected. Public service sector has been chosen as an empirical study to verify the proposed model. An interview followed by face to face questionnaire which involved 100 subjects has been conducted to explore and investigate what the critical emotional needs related to service attributes in the public service sector. The findings were deemed to be important for local government in prioritizing which services need to be improved. More importantly, it is hoped that both parties (i.e., public and local government) will experience the public service offerings in more effective and efficient way