Usability Evaluation of E-Government Websites in Saudi Arabia by Cognitive Walkthrough

Introduction

With the widespread use and advancement in technology, governmental organizations have also taken steps to apply the technology in the public sector organizations generally called as e-government. (Garcia 2005). Since the widespread use of this technology, governmental organizations are also facing some challenges, when it comes to user interaction and usability is considered as one of the major issues in the field of user interaction (Mohammad 2015).

E-Government is defined as the use of the advance technology by governmental organizations to provide quality services to their citizens and business (Wan 2010). Generally, it is the process of providing easy accessible services to citizens, deleting extra effort and extra systems, cost effectiveness and achieving other goals such as accountability and transparency very easily (Raza 2016). Therefore, e-government is defined as the easiest way of electronic communications between the government, citizens and the business organizations. There are manifold benefits (Ndou 2004) of the implementation of e-government both for developing and developed countries such as:

• 1.

  E-government is considered as the easiest way to get access to the governmental services offered to the customers without any time constraint i.e. government services are available to the citizens without any delay 24/7 i.e. 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

• 2.

  Reduction in organizational cost and time.

• 3.

  Customers/citizens satisfaction due to delivery of the services at their door steps with any extra effort.

• 4.

  Improved transparency, accuracy and security of information and knowledge sharing etc.

Usability is defined as the user satisfaction degree to which users can use the system efficiently and effectively. Usability Evaluation is a process of measuring the usability traits of the user interface in order to identify common usability problems. Usability is considered as one of the most important factor in assessing the quality of user interfaces. The race to develop more user friendly web applications has paved a way for a number of methods and tools to cope with the usability problems. In addition, a wide number of usability evaluation methods are developed to evaluate the user friendliness of an interface.

Usability evaluation methods are divided into the following main categories:

• 1.

  User Based Methods: End users which are the real users of the system are the part of the usability evaluation process. By the use of different evaluation tools (interviews, questionnaire and observation), users are meant to assess the performance and user satisfaction levels.

• 2.

  Evaluator’s Methods: To measure and assess the usability of a system a number of usability experts (evaluators) are taking part in this category of usability evaluation. Heuristic Evaluation and cognitive walkthrough are considered as the most widely used method in this category.

• 3.

  Tool based Methods: This method is used to identify usability related problems automatically by the use of various software tools (Gull 2015).