Usability Patterns for e-government sites

Abstract

The accelerated technological development together with the increasingly widespread access to Internet, has marked an important milestone in the way in which governments provide information and most services to citizens. Currently, it has become imperative that citizens can execute much of their procedures in a quick and efficient way, and even without leaving home. Governments are obliged to provide tools so that processes can be carried out safely but also ensuring the satisfaction of the users who execute them. After a previous investigation, in which an evaluation process was carried out in order to determine the level of usability that e-government sites present, it was possible to identify a set of recurring problems that affect the ease of use of this type of sites, which would be solved through the so-called usability patterns. This paper presents the set of usability patterns developed under the context of e-government applications, with the aim of providing design tools for this type of sites and thus avoid problems that threaten the ease of use of services that are provided to citizens from public or governmental institutions’ portals. A set of usability patterns were developed based on identified problems and existing catalogs. The developed patterns were applied to an e-government site which was later evaluated, verifying a substantial increase in the usability level with respect to a previously executed evaluation.