Evaluating Website Quality by Addressing Quality Gaps: A Modular Process

Quality is a mainstream issue for Websites and Web-based systems. Analysts, designers and developers can choose from a variety of models and methods to design and evaluate quality Websites. However, our experience, both as users and professionals, is too often disappointing. Besides usability, the most known of the factors contributing to a Website's quality, there are a large numbers of other features to take into account. Moreover, some of these features go beyond the scope of Computer Science and Information Systems. A systemic and systematic approach to Website quality evaluation has to take into account (1) the role of the Website for the company or organization and (2) a collection of requirements arising from the usually large number of different users of the Website. This paper investigates the application of an approach in which a Website's quality goals are described in terms of the elimination of quality gaps. The quality gaps are derived from a highly successful model for the quality of services widely applied in Economics and Management. The paper focuses on the need for a flexible evaluation process starting from the identification of the quality gaps. The result is a modular process including an initial set of guidelines extracted from projects run on more than fifteen years for Websites in diverse sectors.