Online Review-Assisted Product Improvement Attribute Extraction and Prioritization Method for Small-and Medium-Sized Enterprises

Small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) play a vital role in the global economy, driving innovation and economic growth, despite constraints on their financial and operational resources. In the competitive landscape of modern markets, continuous product design improvement has become essential for SMEs to meet dynamic user requirements, enhance satisfaction, and maintain competitiveness. Online reviews have emerged as valuable sources of user feedback, offering real-time, large-scale insights into user preferences. However, existing methods for leveraging online reviews in product design improvement have significant limitations, including insufficient attention paid to the hierarchical structure of different attributes when extracting product improvement attributes and a lack of quantitative attribute prioritization strategies. These shortcomings often result in suboptimal improvement and inefficient resource allocation, particularly for SMEs with limited resources. To address these challenges, this study proposed a novel online review-assisted method for product design improvement tailored to the needs of SMEs. The proposed method incorporates a hierarchical latent Dirichlet allocation model to extract and organize product attributes hierarchically, thereby enabling a comprehensive understanding of user requirements. Furthermore, a marginal utility-based approach is employed to prioritize product improvement attributes quantitatively, ensuring that the most impactful attributes are addressed efficiently. The effectiveness of the proposed method was demonstrated through a case study on the design improvement of a robotic vacuum cleaner developed using a typical SME in robotic cleaning solutions.