Title: Development of a fuzzy integrated software tool to prioritise technical requirements for effective design of online shopping websites

Authors: Ashish K. Sharma; Sunanda P. Khandait

Addresses: Department of Computer Science and Engineering, PIET, Nagpur, India ' Department of Information Technology, KDK College of Engineering and Technology, Nagpur, India

Abstract: Recently, there has been a tremendous growth in the online shopping; nevertheless the users' satisfaction rate has dropped largely due to poor design of websites. Thus, there is a pressing need of well-designed websites. Decision making plays a significant role in effective design of websites. Quality function deployment (QFD) being a decision making tool, can be employed for the design of online shopping websites. However, QFD uses linguistic expressions and follows crisp approach generating uncertainty and vagueness which leads to inconsistency in results. This requires fuzzy integration with QFD to address the issue. In QFD, the customer needs (CNs) and technical requirements (TRs) are prioritised. However, the paper considers TRs prioritisation only and in this regard it aims to develop a fuzzy integrated technical requirements prioritisation software tool for effective design of online shopping websites. The tool is developed using VB.Net and MS-Access and symmetrical triangular fuzzy numbers (STFNs) are proposed to deal with the uncertainty and vagueness.

Keywords: quality function deployment; QFD; technical requirements; customer needs; prioritisation; online shopping websites; website design; symmetrical triangular fuzzy numbers; STFN; decision making; VB.Net; fuzzy integrated software; fuzzy logic; user satisfaction; uncertainty; vagueness.

DOI: 10.1504/IJCSYSE.2017.083168

International Journal of Computational Systems Engineering, 2017 Vol.3 No.1/2, pp.91 - 110

Received: 08 Sep 2016
Accepted: 23 Dec 2016
Published online: 21 Mar 2017 *

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