Quality function deployment and its use in designing information technology systems

Abstract

Presently, there is much focus on measuring and improving the quality of industrial systems with little attention paid to the quality of information technology (IT) related systems. In this paper, we present a study using the technique quality function deployment (QFD) to design and improve IT systems. QFD is a useful technique and has been applied successfully in traditional hardware product design. We show that it is equally useful for the design of IT‐related systems. In particular, we used QFD to study the human/user interface aspects of several World WideWeb home pages. On‐line surveys were used to obtain rankings of customer voices that are important in QFD. The results show that it is a useful technique that should be more commonly used for IT‐related systems.