A Novel Software Tool to Generate Customer Needs for Effective Design of Online Shopping Websites

—Effective design of online shopping websites\udis the need of the hour as design plays a crucial role in the\udsuccess of online shopping businesses. Recently, the use\udof Quality Function Deployment (QFD) has been\udreported for the design of online shopping websites. QFD\udis a customer driven process that encompasses\udvoluminous data gathered from customers through\udseveral techniques like personal interview, focus groups,\udsurveys etc. This massive, unsorted and unstructured data\udis required to be transformed into a limited number of\udstructured information to represent the actual Customer\udNeeds (CNs) which are then utilized in subsequent stages\udof QFD process. This can be achieved through\udbrainstorming using techniques like Affinity Process.\udHowever, integrating the Affinity Process within QFD is\udtedious and time consuming and cannot be dealt with\udmanually. This generates a pressing need for a software\udtool to serve the purpose. Moreover, the researches\udcarried out so far have focused on QFD application, post\udthe generation of CNs. Also, the available QFD softwares\udlack the option to generate CNs from collected data. Thus,\udthe paper aims to develop a novel software tool that\udintegrates Affinity Process with QFD to generate\udcustomers‘ needs for effective design of online shopping\udwebsites. The software system is developed using Visual\udBasic Dot Net (VB.Net) that integrates a MS-Access\uddatabase