Understanding Customer Opinions From Online Discussion Forums: A Design Science Framework

Online discussion forums, which are full of user-generated content including user opinions and comments, are a potential gold mine for exploring new and useful ideas to augment competence in innovation. Companies need to systematically analyze and interpret online commentaries to enhance in-house research and design activities. To this end, a framework is proposed using a design science approach to enable automatic analysis of the content of online opinions and comments in connection with specific products, using a web lexicon established for this purpose. Furthermore, this framework is applied to an automobile as a proof-of-concept. Several nicknames for the car brand studied were created by web users, some with irony and sarcasm. A few metaphorical expressions were also used to describe product features. Engineering practitioners should recognize the importance of stylized online expressions in order to have a better understanding of customer needs and expectations through the application of this framework, which incorporates an evolutionary web lexicon.