Evaluation of Universities Websites in Chennai city, India Using Analytical Hierarchy Process

Transcription

1 International Conference on Electrical, Electronics, and Optimization Techniques (ICEEOT) Evaluation of Universities Websites in Chennai city, India Using Analytical Hierarchy Process Febronica Faustina 3rd Year B.Tech (IT), CEG, Anna University, Chennai, India dffaustina@gmail.com Abstract Universities have offered their online academic services to their stakeholders from all over the world through website, in order to gain competitive edge in the universities requirements to maintain the quality of their websites on the basis of different criteria. The major aim of this paper is to evaluate the quality of three universities websites in Chennai city, India through analytical hierarchy process (AHP). Data was collected using online web diagnostic tools for three months period. Each website is then ranked accordingly on the basis of sum total score of each factor. The results suggest that each factor constitutes differently to evaluate the performance of each website. Keywords Website Quality Criteria, AHP, University, Web- Diagnostic Tools I. INTRODUCTION With the advancement in Internet, a new emerging topic in the field of information system is evaluation of website quality [1-2]. More customers are accessible by the users while using websites of the firms [3]. Companies attract the customers around the world in order to gain competitive edge over others. But, the major task for the companies is to maintain the quality of their website through which user interact with the firms to acquire knowledge about their products and services. To evaluate the quality of a website is a complex task; however, the users demand high quality features of websites [4]. New automated methods need to be used to evaluate the performance of a website on the basis of design, layout and the contents available on the website. Each website needs to be evaluated on different criteria and these criteria need to be evaluated using online website quality evaluation tool (WQET), which is available on Internet [4]. A careful consideration is required while evaluating the factors of websites using these online web diagnostic tools [5]. The websites are believed to be more credible if they pass through a test of quality. Therefore, a single method is used in this paper to evaluate the quality of website. As evaluating the website is a complex task and human judgment might not be precise to evaluate each factor carefully, therefore analytical hierarchy process (AHP) is a best method to use. This paper evaluates the website quality of three Chennai city based Indian universities based on eight criteria by using AHP method. Tharun Balaji Final Year B.Tech (IT), CEG, Anna University Chennai, India tharun7194@gmail.com II. RELATED WORK Internet is one of the best medium to shop online and also to perform business activities around the world [1-2]. Firms are adopting their websites to attract the customers around the globe. Website gives an access for the user to utilize the web services provided by the company. The websites gives quick access to their users to log in and provide their product and services information round the clock time. A successful website is defined as a group of interface and functional attributes that are connected to each other to serve high levels of usability, performance, and beauty to users, to satisfy users wants, and to obtain their satisfaction in a competitive market of online and offline sales and information services [6]. The information available on the website should reduce the uncertainties to make the website more authentic to the users [7-8], as the firms earn the profit through their websites [6]. With information availability, the ease of use of the websites is also very important factor [9-10] users must be satisfied with the quality of websites [9]. The successful website depends on the design, usability and technical aspects of a website [11] and many factors constitute for a quality website [12]. To evaluate the factors of the quality websites AHP method is used as tool. AHP and FAHP are the two main approaches to evaluate multiple decision making criteria situations. Literature shows the significance of AHP method. A. AnalyticalHhierarchy Process (AHP AHP is a method to use when there is complex decision making [13]. When a goal is clear and a set of alternatives are available, AHP is an appropriate method to choose [14]. AHP method quantifies the criteria and identifies the solutions of a problem for decision makers [15]. A pairwise matrix is obtained by comparing each criterion. In AHP the first step is to identify the goal by presenting the problems into hierarchy and strength of each factor shown through pairwise matrix [2, 4, 14, 16] which is based on the individual judgments [16]. As AHP combines multiple criteria, so construction of hierarchy is the first step in AHP. The AHP methods use the following steps to reach the decision [14, 17]. B. Proposed Method based on AHP In comparison to quantitative judgement human are good in qualitative judgement [18] which sometimes results in imprecise judgement in real problem giving uncertain results /16/$ IEEE

2 This uncertainty in the judgement of preference matrix gives an uncertain ranking of criteria [14]. The AHP handles both qualitative and quantitative criteria of multi-criteria decision making problems based on the judgement of decision maker [19]. If a goal is clear AHP is the appropriate method to find the solution. The first level in the hierarchy shows the goal which is to select the best university website. The second level shows the eight criteria (Load time, page size, no. of items, broken links, response time, page rank, traffic, and design optimization) adopted from past studies [2-5] on which the quality of each university website will be evaluated and the lowest level shows the university websites which needs to be evaluated. The AHP model is presented in Figure 1. Figure 1. Hierarchal Method Based on AHP III. RESEARCH METHODOLOGY In order to evaluate the quality of university websites in this paper, two objectives were established. First, to evaluate the website quality based on the identified criteria and second, to measure the performance of university websites in Chennai city, India. In India generally universities were started and support by The Government of India, The state government, and by private parties. In Chennai city more than 50 technical universities/ colleges are present. However, it is not possible to take all of them. Hence the researcher has selected top universities of each kind as a sample. The three selected university websites are: a) Anna University ( this is a Tamilnadu, state government university, b) Indian Institute of Technology, Madras ( this is a government of India University and c) SRM University ( ) this is a private university. d) The ranking of each university website according to website based on Webometric survey 2015 is presented in table 1. Table 1: Ranking of the Indian University website based on Webometric survey 2015 University URL Address World Ranking India Ranking Anna University Indian Institute of Technology, Madras SRM university In order to collect data, various web diagnostic tools were used which are available free on Internet. The results were revalidated again using alternative tools available on internet. The data collection period was three months from August 2015 to October 2015 and data has been taken at different period of time to check if there is any significant difference observed during the time. A list of all criteria and their website quality evaluation tools is presented in table 2. Table 2: Online Web- Diagnostic Tools for Data Collection Criteria Web Alternative Tools Diagnostic Tools Load Time tools.pingdom.com (A) om Page Size (B) tools.pingdom.com om Number of tools.pingdom.com Items (C) Broken Link (D) com/broken-links Response Time (E) m/help/testtools.websit etest.html Page Rank (F) heck_page_rank.php -checker Traffic (G) Design Optimization (H) tools.pingdom.com The AHP scale range from 1 to 9, so the value of 1 to 9 is given to each criterion based on the priority of one criterion over the other. The linguistic expression of AHP table is given below in table 3.

3 Table 3: AHP Values Linguistic Expressions Equal 1 Equal Moderate 2 Moderate 3 Moderate- Fairly Strong 4 Fairly Strong 5 Fairly Strong- Very Strong 6 Very Strong 7 Very Strong- Absolute 8 Absolute 9 AHP IV. RESULT AND DISCUSSION The data was collected using online web diagnostic tools presented in table 4. In first column all criteria are listed and the unit of measurement for each criterion is presented in second column. The data for each university website ANNA, IITM and SRM is displayed in the respective column of three, four and five respectively. Data was collected from 30 different trials during August 2015 to October Hence, an average value of each criterion was obtained and presented Table 5. Pairwise Comparison Matrix using AHP in table 4 for the researcher analysis purpose. Each criterion is labeled from A to H. Table 4: Primary Data for each University Website Criteria Unit of Anna IITM SRM Measurement Load Time Seconds (A) Page Size (B) Kb/Seconds Number of Number Items (C) Broken Link Number (D) Response Seconds Time (E) Page Rank (F) Number ( out of 10 ) Traffic (G) Number Design Optimization (H) Percentage After obtaining the average value of each criterion a pairwise comparison matrix based on the AHP scale was obtained. The factor which is more important over other has assigned the higher value. Table 5 presents the pairwise comparison matrix for all criteria. For example, from the above table, the intersecting cell A and B got the value 6, it represents criteria A got more importance than criteria B which is in the scale of fairly strong to very strong criteria for website quality evaluation. The same procedure is followed for each university website to calculate the pairwise matrix for all criteria. The next step is to get the weight for every criterion by normalizing the data. The steps applied to the criteria matrix and weights will be calculated by following the three steps. 1. Sum the elements in each column. 2. Divide each value by its column total. 3. Calculate row average. Table 6: Final Results for each Criteria Using AHP

4 For example, from the above table, criteria load time got more importance (0.30) 30% weight when compared to other criteria. The procedure is continued for each of the criteria based on the primary data, to obtain the values in table 7. The Table 7: Final Results for Universities websites Using AHP total sum indicates the value of each university website on eight selected criteria. Final results are presented in table 7shows the value of each criterion for each university website; sum the total for each website. The results suggests that website with highest score on all eight criteria total is selected the best university website based on AHP method. In this paper, the best website is Indian Institute of Technology, Madras which is ranked 1 with a total score of 0.452, followed by SRM University, which is ranked 2 with a score of and then Anna University which is ranked 3 with a total score of V. CONCLUSION AND FUTURE WORK The major aim of this paper was to evaluate the quality of universities websites through which they deliver the online services to their stakeholders. A set of identified criteria were listed on which the quality of each website was evaluated. As websites are dynamic in nature, so a significant difference in results might be obtained, but for this paper no such dynamic change had been observed. Three different status universities of Chennai city, India were chosen based on the AHP method and results suggested that all universities websites are functioning well on the identified criteria. The websites are thus available to their users delivering their services online. The major limitation identified is the time frame during this research of three months duration with limited number of trails particularly after admission process was completed by all universities. The data was collected using cross sectional approach, the future studies may focus on the longitudinal studies which may suggest different and more significant results. Another major limitation is that website quality of universities was analyzed using single method approach which uses AHP. In future research the website quality may be evaluated using other methods such as Fuzzy AHP, linear weightage model etc. Further, the website quality needs to be evaluated by adding more criteria to get more accurate results from evaluation. REFERENCES [1] Dominic, P., & Khan, H. (2014b). Performance measure of airline websites using analytical hierarchy process & fuzzy analytical hierarchy process. Paper presented at the Control System, Computing and Engineering (ICCSCE), 2014 IEEE International Conference at Bali, Indonesia. [2] Khan, H., & Dominic, P. (2013). Measuring Quality of Asian Airline Websites Using Analytical Hierarchy Process: A Future Customer Satisfaction Approach. ISICO [3] Dominic, P., & Jati, H. (2011). A comparison of Asian airlines websites quality: using a non-parametric test. International Journal of Business Innovation and Research, 5(5), [4] Dominic, P., Jati, H., Sellappan, P., & Nee, G. K. (2011). A comparison of Asian e-government websites quality: usinga non-parametric test. International Journal of Business Information Systems, 7(2), [5] Dominic, P., & Khan, H. (2014a). Evaluation of online system acceptance through airlines websites in Malaysia. Paper presented at the Computer and Information Sciences (ICCOINS), 2014 International Conference at Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. [6] Lee, S., Lee, S., & Park, Y. (2007). A prediction model for success o services in e-commerce using decision tree: E customer s attitude towards online service. Expert Systems with Applications, 33(3), [7] Akehurst, G. (2009). User generated content: the use of blogs for tourism organizations and tourism consumers. Service Business, 3(1), [8] Dharmavaram Sreenivasan, N., Sian Lee, C., & Hoe-Lian Goh, D. (2012). Tweeting the friendly skies: Investigating information exchange among Twitter users about airlines. Program, 46(1), [9] Law, R., & Bai, B. (2008). How do the preferences of online buyers an browsers differ on the design and content of travel websites? International Journal of Contemporary Hospitality Management, 20(4), [10] Lee, P.-M. (2002). Behavioral model of online purchasers in e-commerce environment. Electronic Commerce Research, 2(1-2), [11] Goi, C. L. (2011). The impact of Web site attributes on internet users online behavior: Malaysian perspective. Management and Economics, 3, [12] Flavian, C., Gurrea, R., & Orús, C. (2009). Web design: a key factor for the website success. Journal of Systems and Information Technology, 11(2), [13] Saaty, T. L. (1980). The analytic hierarchy process: planning, priority setting, resources allocation. New York:McGraw. [14] Rouyendegh, B. D., & Erkart, T. (2012). Selection of academic staff using the fuzzy analytic hierarchy process(fahp): a pilot study. Tehnicki Vjesnik, 19(4),

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