The Impact of UXd in Lean Product Development and Design Processes; The Case of Automotive Industry

In the last two decades, lean product development and design processes, which have rapidly penetrated the automotive industry companies with all their functions and spread globally, have come to life with measurements, benchmarks and flow maps on value creation or value addition in new product project stages. In the literature review, two customer-oriented approaches, namely lean product development and user experience design, have been widely adopted within the discipline of new product design. However, the lack of comparative efficiency measurements or studies addressing their integration in scientific publications constitutes the primary motivation of this research. Furthermore, the selection of the research scope and boundaries is based on convenience sampling, enabled by direct qualitative research with companies managerial or design positions in the Turkish automotive supplier industry. The main objective of this study is to conduct a comparative analysis aimed at integrating user experience activities with lean product development process flows, and to reveal metric values that enhance efficiency through overall system optimization. On the other hand, the most important recommendation of the study is that the basic process will benefit positively by including user experience activities, which are the most important application of customer-oriented design approaches, into the highly efficient lean product development flow. Therefore, the study conducted with the mixed research method was completed under the preference of quantitative face-to-face interview method in the in-depth questioning of the qualitative numerical data obtained by the questionnaire method. User experience activities, which are newer and less widespread than lean product development processes, have also revealed the frequency of project-based, customer-oriented design activities, along with the demographic organizational structure of the participating companies in the automotive industry, such as the age of establishment, number of employees, number of designers, etc.