Expectations and Rankings of Website Quality Features: Results of Two Studies on User Perceptions

In the emerging electronic environment, the creation of customer-centered websites is becoming increasingly important. This paper reports two exploratory studies on user perceptions of using web sites. We first use Kano's Model of Quality to conduct an investigation of quality features in the web environment. An independently conducted study later expands the first study by addressing several limitations. The results of both studies suggest that (1) the Kano quality model can be used as a framework to control for website quality in terms of three quality types and the time transition of the quality nature; (2) not every feature is regarded as equally important within a web domain; (3) different domains have different rankings of important features, although there are certain features that are regarded as highly important among domains studied. These studies provide some empirical evidence on user perceptions of website quality features and lead to further theoretical investigations.