A fuzzy-based framework for evaluation of website design quality index

An unrecognized significance of the web acts as a driving force for the massive and rapid growth of websites in each domain of social life. For making a successful website, it is necessary for developers to embrace appropriate web testing and evaluation methodology. Some valuable works in the past have striven to appraise the web applications quantitatively. Various parameters have been considered which are again sub-parameterized to measurable indicators. But their weighing criterion has not been appropriately taken into account according to the domain of the website. Also, the relative degrees of interactions among parameters have not been taken into consideration. The work presented in this paper aims at describing a framework, Quality Index Evaluation Method to gauge the design quality of a website in the form of index value. An automated tool has been designed and coded to measure the metrics quantitatively. A weighing technique based on Fuzzy-DEMATEL (Decision Making Trial and Evaluation Laboratory Method) has been applied on these metrics. Fuzzy trapezoidal numbers have been used for assessment of parameters and the final design quality index value. To verify the use of framework in different website domains, it has been exercised on eight academic (four institutional and four digital libraries), five informative and four commercial websites. The results have been validated through the most widely used method in literature, i.e., user judgment. Opinions of users for each website have been quantified and aggregated with fuzzy aggregation technique. Experimental results show that the proposed framework provides accurate and consistent results in very less time.