Evaluating Chinese government WeChat official accounts in public service delivery: A user-centered approach

Abstract

WeChat official accounts have been increasingly adopted by Chinese government agencies to deliver public services, in response to the “Internet + Public Service” reformation. While previous studies depended heavily on the expert-oriented approach to evaluate the accounts, this paper presents a user-centered study based on a mixed methods research design in which an unobtrusive clickstream data analysis was complemented by a card sorting study, stakeholder interviews, and a focus group. A 2-month server log file containing 42,188,760 clickstream records was obtained from an active government WeChat official account and analyzed at the movement level, which found that the account was mainly used as a lookup tool with most services underutilized and its home portals failed to support effective wayfinding to needed services. Deficiencies in information architecture, operation strategy, and interaction design of the account were identified in the complementary studies. This study not only enriches the knowledge about social media use in the Chinese government for public service delivery, but also introduces innovative methods to generate new research insights. The findings can inform government WeChat official accounts of how to improve service quality and user experience.