E-Government Usability Evaluation: A Comparison between Algeria and the UK

Abstract

e-Government holds the keys to improving government services provided to citizens and the private sectors within their countries. Although Algeria is the largest country in Africa and has one of the most thriving economies in the continent, it is remarkable that the Algerian EGDI ranking was 120th according to the latest UN e-government survey. This inspired the researcher to investigate the relationship between the success factors of e-services in developed countries and their counterparts in developing countries. The main aim of this study is to explore the factors that influence the level of usability of e-government services between developing and developed countries against a set of specific guidelines to provide means for improving these services in developing countries. The researcher selectively extracted three guideline categories from Research-Based Web Design and Usability Guidelines as a means for expert evaluation of 10 Algerian e-government services compared to British e-government services. Our results show that Algerian e-services lack mostly in Use Frames when Functions Must Remain Accessible, Highlighting Information, and Graphics Should Not Look like Banner Ads (belonging to Page Layout, Text Appearance, and Graphics, Images & Multimedia respectively), whereas UK e-services scored highly across all three categories. These findings further enhance the UN e-government survey and identifies the sub-categories that developing countries need to pay more attention to in order to provide a more reliable and robust e-service to its users and citizens. Furthermore, this study proposes that the Research-Based Web Design & Usability Guidelines can be converted into an evaluation tool to be used by evaluators to easily assess the usability of a website. The combination of relative importance, chapters of the guidelines, and their respective guidelines gathered from Research-Based Web Design & Usability Guidelines, along with the evaluation of these individual guidelines by evaluators will serve as an integral tool for developers when developing e-government services to reach the satisfaction of the users.