A Novel Fuzzy Integrated Customer Needs Prioritization Software Tool for Effective Design of Online Shopping Websites

Albeit, online shopping has grown much recently, users' rate of satisfaction has declined due to the ineffective design of online shopping websites. Thus, the companies involved are craving for well-designed websites. Effective website design involves decision making and thus this paper considers Quality Function Deployment (QFD) as it is a strong decision-making tool. However, QFD uses crisp scoring approach that generates uncertainty and vagueness resulting in impreciseness and inconsistency in results. The issue can be addressed using fuzzy integration. QFD involves prioritization of Customer Needs (CNs) and Technical Requirements (TRs). However, the paper focuses on only CNs prioritization. Also, the existing software's lack the indispensable fuzzy support feature to handle the uncertainty and vagueness. Thus, the paper presents a novel fuzzy integrated customer needs prioritization software tool. The tool is built using Visual Basic Dot Net (VB.Net) and MS-Access. A real-life example is presented to demonstrate the viability of the software tool.