Analytic Hierarchy Process for website evaluation

Article type: Research Article

Authors: Kabassi, Katerina

Affiliations: School of Applied Sciences, TEI of Ionian Islands, Panagoula, 29100 Zakynthos, Greece | Tel.: +30 2695021059; Fax: +30 2695042077; E-mail: [email protected]

Abstract: The evaluation of a website is a complex procedure and, therefore, is often omitted in the website life-cycle despite its importance. Taking into account the suitability of Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) for evaluating software and the wide usage of the theory in the evaluation of websites, we make a state of the art on the evaluation experiments conducted using the AHP theory. More specifically, the paper presents evaluation experiments that use AHP, fuzzy AHP or their combination with other methods for website evaluation. The paper focuses on websites of different domains, e.g. e-government, e-banking, e-news, e-health and e-education, summarizes and presents the steps that need to be taken for the application of AHP irrelevant to the domain of the websites. The outcome of the literature review of AHP evaluation studies is three sets of the most frequently used evaluation criteria for the different domains examined (e-government, e-education/e-university, e-health). In order to demonstrate the usefulness of the proposed sets of criteria in real-world evaluation studies, we conducted one evaluation experiment per domain examined.

Keywords: Websites’ evaluation, Analytic Hierarchy Process, multi criteria decision making

DOI: 10.3233/IDT-170316

Journal: Intelligent Decision Technologies, vol. 12, no. 2, pp. 137-148, 2018