Usability in E-government Sites

On occasion, central governments have been considered incapable and inefficient managers to meet the expectations of its citizens. Governments have been forced to make radical changes. They also have been pressured by the rapid advancement of technology and the societal needs eager for greater efficiency and transparency in public administration. Every day, more and more e-government sites appear on the web. However, their results are poor due to the fact that despite making great economic efforts and investing many resources, they have not obtained the expected results. Consequently, the citizens don´t feel satisfied with the offered services. This has caused a greater fear of the e-government sites by citizens. Many sites for different reasons have been abandoned and are not in use anymore. The development of web sites considering usability standards is a reality today. However, due to the lack of design parameters for designing specific e-government sites, the developers have not had success with their products. Assessing the usability in these kinds of web sites is a first step in discovering specific recurrent usability problems. Wherein, future works can be fixed using usability patterns that will be created for this goal. This paper shows a usability study conducted on the three e-government sites whose common service is providing to the citizens a complaints system through the web. As a result of the evaluation, a set of recurrent usability problems were detected.