Implementation of Kano's model in web metrics for information driven websites - KDQI

Nowadays it is mandatory for any company to maintain its presence on the web. Massive amount of cost and efforts are employed in development and maintenance of a quality website to gain more customers and retain the existing ones. The companies make significant investment towards attractiveness of their website. No matter how much the company is satisfied with the functionality, content and visualization of its website, but as the saying goes `Beauty lies in the eyes of the beholder', the user of the website is the main component in evaluating the quality of the website. GPI (Guidance Performance Indicator) is a web metric used to measure the effectiveness and efficiency of a web site, in meeting its objective to guide the user to his/her required content. On the other hand, Kano (a Japanese management researcher) amended the famous Herzberg's two factor theory that Quality expectations can be defined as Basic, Performance or Excitement and these factors vary with time. This theory was utilized in a survey, initially for finding quality factors for CNN.com and finally for specific clusters of domains. This Study has implemented the fundamentals of the Kano's model in a form of web metric. The new web metric KDQI (Kano's Domain Quality Index) is actually an extension of already available web metric GPI, incorporating the quality perspective of Kano. The variation of quality parameters in the website that occur with the passage of time is also integrated in the GPI web metric. As the study was aimed only for Information driven websites, the e-commerce or transactional websites were excluded from the results of Kano's research survey.