Usability Guidelines for Arab E-government Websites

Authors: Omyma Al Osaimi, Asma AlSumait

Abstract:

The website developer and designer should follow usability guidelines to provide a user-friendly interface. Many guidelines and heuristics have been developed by previous studies to help both the developer and designer in this task, but E-government websites are special cases that require specialized guidelines. This paper introduces a set of 18 guidelines for evaluating the usability of e-government websites in general and Arabic e-government websites specifically, along with a check list of how to apply them. The validity and effectiveness of these guidelines were evaluated against a variety of user characteristics. The results indicated that the proposed set of guidelines can be used to identify qualitative similarities and differences with user testing and that the new set is best suited for evaluating general and e-governmental usability.

Keywords: E-government, Human Computer Interaction, Usability Evaluation, Usability Guidelines.

Digital Object Identifier (DOI): doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.1089601

References:

[1] Ma, H. Y. T., & Zaphiris, P. (2003). The Usability and Content Accessibility of the E-government in the UK.
[2] Baker, D. L. (2009). Advancing E-Government performance in the United States through enhanced usability benchmarks. Government Information Quarterly, 26(1), 82-88.
[3] Asiimwe, E. N., & Lim, N. (2010). Usability of government websites in Uganda. Electronic Journal of e-Government, 8(1), 1-12.
[4] Garcia, A.C.B., Maciel, C., Pinto, F.B.: A Quality Inspection Method to Evaluate E-Government Sites. In: Wimmer, M.A., Traunmüller, R., Grönlund, Å., Andersen, K.V. (eds.) EGOV 2005. LNCS, vol. 3591, pp. 198–209. Springer, Heidelberg (2005)
[5] Al-Khalifa, H. S. (2010, October). Heuristic evaluation of the usability of e-government websites: a case from Saudi Arabia. In Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Theory and Practice of Electronic Governance (pp. 238-242). ACM.
[6] Bevan, N.: Measuring usability as quality of use. Software Quality Journal 4, 115–130 (1995).
[7] Horan, T. A., Abhichandani, T., & Rayalu, R. (2006, January). Assessing user satisfaction of e-government services: development and testing of quality-in-use satisfaction with advanced traveler information systems (ATIS). In System Sciences, 2006. HICSS'06. Proceedings of the 39th Annual Hawaii International Conference on (Vol. 4, pp. 83b-83b). IEEE.
[8] Lappin, J., "What We Have Learned About Advanced Traveler Information Systems and Customer Satisfaction?," appeared in the Proceedings of Workshop on Human Factors and Safety Research, Cambridge, MA, USA, November 13-15, 2000.
[9] West, D. M., "E-Government and the Transformation of Service Delivery and Citizen Attitudes," Public Administration Review, vol. 64, no. 1, pp. 15-27, 2004.
[10] Van Velsen, L., van der Geest, T., ter Hedde, M., & Derks, W. (2009). Requirements engineering for e-Government services: A citizen-centric approach and case study. Government Information Quarterly, 26(3), 477-486.
[11] Jeffries, R., & Desurvire, H. (1992). Usability testing vs. heuristic evaluation: was there a contest?. ACM SIGCHI Bulletin, 24(4), 39-41.
[12] Hvannberg, E. T., Law, E. L. C., & Lárusdóttir, M. K. (2007). Heuristic evaluation: Comparing ways of finding and reporting usability problems. Interacting with computers, 19(2), 225-240.
[13] Ivory, M. Y., Mankoff, J., & Le, A. (2003). Using automated tools to improve web site usage by users with diverse abilities. Human-Computer Interaction Institute, 117.
[14] Vanderdonckt, J., Beirekdar, A., & Noirhomme-Fraiture, M. (2004). Automated evaluation of web usability and accessibility by guideline review. In Web Engineering (pp. 17-30). Springer Berlin Heidelberg.
[15] Wang, L., Bretschneider, S., Gant, J.: Evaluating web-based e-government services with a citizen-centric approach. In: Proceedings of the 38th Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, vol. 5, pp. 129–139 (2005).
[16] Bernhaupt, R., Mihalic, K., & Obrist, M. (2008). Usability evaluation methods for mobile applications. Handbook Res User Interface Des Evaluation for Mobile Technology, 44, 745-758.
[17] Hung, S. Y., Chang, C. M., & Kuo, S. R. (2012). User acceptance of mobile e-government services: An empirical study. Government Information Quarterly.
[18] Kim, Y., Yoon, J., Park, S., & Han, J. (2004). Architecture for implementing the mobile government services in Korea. In Conceptual Modeling for Advanced Application Domains (pp. 601-612). Springer Berlin Heidelberg.
[19] Al-khamayseh, S., Lawrence, E., & Zmijewska, A. (2006). Towards understanding success factors in interactive mobile government. In The Proceedings of Euro mGov (pp. 3-5).
[20] Mengistu, D., Zo, H., & Rho, J. J. (2009, November). M-government: Opportunities and Challenges to Deliver Mobile Government Services in Developing Countries. In Computer Sciences and Convergence Information Technology, 2009. ICCIT'09. Fourth International Conference on (pp. 1445-1450). IEEE.
[21] Huang, Z., & Brooks, L. (2012). Usability Evaluation and Redesign of E-Government: Users’ Centred Approach. Recent Advances in Computer Science and Information Engineering, 615-625.
[22] Donker-Kuijer, M.W., Jong, M., Lentz, L.: Usable guidelines for usable websites? an analysis of five e-government heuristics. Government Information Quarterly 27, 254–263 (2010).
[23] Belachew, M. (2010, October). e-government initiatives in Ethiopia. In Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Theory and Practice of Electronic Governance (pp. 49-54). ACM.
[24] Holden, S.H., Norris, D.F., Fletcher, P.D.: Electronic government at the local level: progress to date and future issue. Public Performance and Management Review 26(4), 325–344 (2003).
[25] Al-Soud, A. R., & Nakata, K. (2010, December). Evaluating e-government websites in Jordan: Accessibility, usability, transparency and responsiveness. In Progress in Informatics and Computing (PIC), 2010 IEEE International Conference on (Vol. 2, pp. 761-765). IEEE.
[26] Petti, C., De Maggio, M., Lanna, M. L., Mele, G., & Solazzo, G. (2010, October). e-business case as a tool for facilitating ICT adoption in local government agencies. In Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Theory and Practice of Electronic Governance (pp. 55-60). ACM.
[27] United Nations. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. Policy Instruction. April 2007. Field Web Site Content. Management and Site. Maintenance.
[28] Usability.Gov. (N.D.). Retrieved August 3, 2012, from http://www.usability.gov.
[29] Customer experience, user experience (UX) agency in London - Webcredible. Content & usability: Web writing. Retrieved August 3, 2012, from http://www.webcredible.co.uk/user-friendly-resources/web-usability/web-content.shtml.
[30] 113 Design Guidelines for Homepage Usability (Nielsen Norman Group). (N.D.). useit.com: Jakob Nielsen on Usability and Web Design. Retrieved From http://Www.useit.com/homepageusability/guidelines.html.
[31] Web Content Types and Review Procedure| Web Guide | US EPA. Environmental Protection Agency. http://yosemite.epa.gov/OEI/ webguide.nsf/standards-guidance/content-review.
[32] Usability.gov. Retrieved August 7, 2012, from http://www.usability.gov/ pdfs/chapter15.pdf.