Keep Kano survey questions on the same level of abstraction

You use the Kano model to support your decision making. The analysis and insights you get from your Kano surveys must therefor be solid.

A mistake often made when preparing a survey is forgetting to maintain an equal level of abstraction between questions. Differing levels of abstraction between questions has a negative impact on the quality of your insights.

For example, these two requirements shouldn't be together in the same questionnaire:

• I can use my phone to open my car
• I can log in on the car app with my social accounts

These questions are not on the same level of abstraction. The former is much more within the general context of car usage. The latter is about a very specific detail of the car's mobile app.

The impact of mixing levels of abstraction is two-fold. First of all, the answers you get on your survey questions are less qualitative. That leads to less useful insights and subptimal decisions. Second, it is difficult to rank and prioritize features that are essentially not comparable.

Don't make it harder for your surveyees

Unless you are talking to them face-to-face, your surveyees don't know a lot about the background of your questions.

Surveyees must understand your questions for you to get valuable answers. Understanding your questions should take as little mental effort as possible.

Going from one question to another is draining and confusing if the levels of abstraction vary too much between them. This impacts the quality of your survey's answers. Your surveyees won't have thought about their answers as much as they should. And that means the quality of your survey analysis goes down as well.

Don't go comparing apples and oranges

You use the Kano model to rank customer attitudes towards your product features.

But how can you prioritize the development of your product if you're comparing general usage with specific details?

What if "I can use my phone to open the car" ranks a lot lower than "I can log in the car app with my social accounts"? Does that mean people don't like being able to open the car with their phone? Or does it mean they do, and that they are very fond of the social login feature? You cannot know.

To get the most value out of your Kano survey, don't mix the levels of abstraction of your questions. Keep them on the same level. If you need to dive deeper into details, do that in a separate survey. They're free anyway :)