Usability of Urban Local Body Websites and Service Quality of E-services

Abstract

Developments in the Information and Communication Technology (ICT) field have brought a significant change in the way citizens can interact with their governments. Traditional governance has been digitalised to what we now know as ‘e-governance’. E-government investments in India had seen a ‘ten-fold increase’ in 2015 with the launch of the Digital India Mission as compared to previous years. Despite this, in 2018, an e-government survey by the United Nations, India’s E-government Development Index (EGDI) was 0.5669, just above the world average of 0.55. As digital literacy is becoming increasingly common in India, along with falling data prices, increasing smartphone and mobile usage, the spotlight of e-government should focus on the usability and quality of its services and platforms. This article measures the usability of the Municipal or Urban Local Body (ULB) websites and the service quality of its e-services. Separate evaluation frameworks are used to measure the usability of the municipal e-government websites of four Indian cities as well as the service quality of the four most commonly used citizen services, viz. complaint registration, payment of property tax, payment of professional taxes and birth/death registration. For this, a thorough study of existent literature on the subject, comprehensive study of the selected websites and discussions with domain experts have been conducted by the authors. The article also discusses some qualitative issues on the usability of these websites and services that were observed during the evaluation process.