Enhancing Data Analysis Skills for Design Students: A Home Appliance Product Design

Data-driven service design (DDSD) plays a crucial role in enhancing various stages of the product development process by systematically collecting and analyzing customer requirements, identifying market opportunities, mapping buying behaviors, and understanding customer preferences. Despite its growing importance, few university courses currently focus on the integration of data into service design, creating a gap in the development of the essential data-related competencies required by modern enterprises. This gap poses ongoing challenges in teaching students how to effectively visualize data, perform rigorous analyses, and extract actionable insights within service design contexts. To address this, the present study proposes a comprehensive DDSD educational framework aimed at improving innovation performance during the early stages of new product development (NPD). The framework combines traditional service design methodologies with structured data-driven approaches, equipping students with the skills needed to bridge creative design thinking and empirical data analysis. Its effectiveness was evaluated by training 40 students using a real-world case study involving a home appliance brand. The results demonstrated significant improvements in the students' ability to apply critical thinking grounded in service design principles, conduct systematic data analyses, interpret complex datasets, and generate meaningful insights that inform innovative solutions. These findings suggest that incorporating DDSD-focused training in higher education can effectively prepare students to meet the data-intensive demands of contemporary service design practices while fostering their capacity for evidence-based innovation.