Development Of Customer Requirements and Design Criteria of Hijab Via Quality Function Deployment Among Female Muslim Students in the Faculty of Management at Universiti Teknologi Malaysia

Abstract

As a university in a nation where Moslems make up the majority, fashion-related matters will spark its interest among students and entrepreneurs, including hijab. With a wide variety of specifications and selections, it is difficult for hijab manufacturers to accommodate a variety of customer requirements. Hence, to stay competitive, it is important for hijab manufacturers to comprehend customer requirements and transform them as design specifications for hijab. As such, this research aims to apply Quality Function Deployment (QFD) to identify the important customer’s requirements of hijab for female Moslem students in the Faculty of Management (FM), Universiti Teknologi Malaysia (UTM), to determine the important design criteria for a new hijab for female Moslem students, and to assess the difference in hijab customers' requirements based on demographics. Five important attributes are identified from the literature review, which are type of hijab, material, colour selection, motif, and price. This study is quantitative based via survey questionnaire, with 216 female moslem students in FM responded. Kendall Coefficient test result revealed that the requirements ranking by the 216 respondents are consistent. Descriptive analysis results suggested that respondents viewed “colour selection” as the most important hijab requirement, followed by material, type of hijab, price and motif. Subsequently, a set of Hijab product specification is proposed based on frequency analysis. The proposed specification fulfilled a minimum of 70% of the customers requirement. Additionally, ANOVA analysis results suggested that customers’ body weight and height made no difference on customers requirement ranking, but customer nationality does affect the ranking of motif requirement. The implication of the finding is perhaps to provide guidance to the hijab manufacturers or Small and Medium Enterprise by concentrating on the certain attribute of hijab to be able to meet the customers’ requirements.