maryam taherikia; Reza Khorshidi; hossein Akbari Yazdi
Abstract
Objective: The purpose of the present study was to evaluate the quality of websites affiliated to sports organizations in Iran and to provide solutions to improve their quality.Methodology: To this end, the Website Quality (WebQual) questionnaire developed by Luciano, Watson, and Goodhue (2007) ...
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Objective: The purpose of the present study was to evaluate the quality of websites affiliated to sports organizations in Iran and to provide solutions to improve their quality.Methodology: To this end, the Website Quality (WebQual) questionnaire developed by Luciano, Watson, and Goodhue (2007) whose validity and reliability had been confirmed by specialists in the field of Sports Quality Management was used to evaluate the Iranian websites and to specify users’ needs. The statistical population of this study included all the students of Physical Education enrolled in the University of Tehran of which a total number of 168 individuals were recruited as the study sample. After determining the users’ needs (using the WebQual questionnaire) through the Quality Function Deployment (QFD) technique and taking the website of Varzesh3 into account as the organization evaluated and the one with the highest level of service quality compared with other three sports websites as model organizations, customers’ needs were converted into service features.Results: In this respect, the results of implementing the QFD technique showed that quick upload of information to a website, ability to interact with a website to receive appropriate information, and easy-to-read webpages in a website had the highest relative weights as the most important needs among users.Conclusion: According to the QFD comments and the QFD team;service features such as user-friendliness, convenience to search for information, consistency between a website and users’ expectations, and capability of establishing forum panels in websites were among the most significant components identified and the desirable technical features which were also strongly correlated with sports website users’ needs.
