QFD and Process Innovation for SYNTHESiST 16.0

“He was an old man who fished alone in a skiff in the Gulf Stream and he had gone eighty-four days now without taking a fish.“

This is the first sentence from Hemingway’s “The Old Man and the Sea.” The first page of the book has 249 words. Just 54 have more than one syllable. I counted.

For the blog, I used a manufacturing tool called Quality Function Deployment (QFD) to design a process to write each post. QFD draws product features out of market needs.

Excellent and readable content is the first market need. First time visitors must stay long and like to come back. They shall love to talk on innovation with others in the site. Their final need is to apply what they learn wherever they may be. I rendered these needs to four: (a) content, (b) readability, (c) stickiness, and (d) network-ability. This post is about the process to deliver readability.

I used the the Flesch-Kincaid Test to get my metrics. A version of the test gets the equivalent grade level (EGL) as follows:

EGL (US) = 0.39 x words / sentence + 11.8 x syllables / word – 15.59

Hemingway used 1.22 syllables per word. I also sampled Seamus Heaney’s Beowulf. Finally, I compiled data from SYNTHESiST’s posts 1-15 and put them all in the table below.

From the table, at least nine years of American education is needed to grasp SYNTHESiST. I need to use simpler words to raise understanding.

Celtic and Anglo-Saxon words are short, strong and rich. So now I am also reading other English poets like T.S. Eliot to brush up on ‘real’ English words. I need to steer clear of longer Greek- and Latin-root words.

It is a long way from 1.58 down to 1.22. This will be a continuous learning and improvement process but with the metrics, I will know if I am moving forward.

I have also decided to set a 340-word target for the length of each post. This is one half of a New York Times Op-Ed article length. This is a hard parameter – this a Greek- or Latin-root word for sure. It gives heed to many modern Filipinos’ lack of zeal for reading.

Do you have new products that can use QFD? If you have experience with QFD in product development, please share with us.