Student focused design and improvement of university courses

Customer satisfaction has become a key factor in the strategic work of many universities towards the increasing competition regarding student recruitment. This paper presents a systematic approach to the course development process where focus is put on student satisfaction and learning. The approach consists of a combined usage of several methods, such as quality function deployment and conjoint analysis, that together transform student needs into quantified course attributes. In the paper, a two‐semester graduate course has been developed where the combined usage of the applied methods has shown itself to be very powerful when designing services from student satisfaction and learning perspectives. The outcome of the study is a university course where pedagogical and learning aspects have been combined with contents and work approaches with substantial interest for the industry.