E-commerce website quality assessment based on usability

Today website is considered as an image of an organization. For designing an effective website it is required to identify the need of the visitors of the website. In current scenario the objective of e-commerce websites is to provide the users or customers a platform where they can retrieve any information and also can perform other tasks like adding to cart, save for later, checkout, payment, tracking records and may more. In this paper, techniques like Adaptive Neuro Fuzzy Inference System Approach (ANFIS) and Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP) were used to assess the usability of e commerce website and propose a model to successfully assess and compare websites on the basis of usability. First of all, the important factors related to usability from the literature or educational materials were identified. A survey using these factors as base was conducted which served as a valuable input from user for identifying the parameters affecting usability, which was further used in assessing the usability parameters of the e-commerce websites (such as Flipkart, Amazon, Snapdeal, Myntra). A Fuzzy inference system (FIS) file was generated using the parameters identified in the survey, member functions and other rules. Training data was generated using the survey conducted. ANFIS system used this training data and FIS file to create an optimal model for assessing the usability of the websites. This model can also be used to identify the important parameters to improve usability of the website using the valuable review of daily website users via the conduct of survey.