EXPLORING AND ANALYZING THE DESIGN METHODOLOGIES FOR DEVELOPING MULTI-CHANNEL E-GOVERNMENT WEBSITES: TOWARDS IMPROVING THE USABILITY OF E-GOVERNMENT WEBSITES OF BANGLADESH

Abstract

Usability and user experience (UX) used to be the key quality attributes of a software system, which one explicitly considered and evaluated to design and develop different types of applications including e-governance, e-commerce, e-learning, e-health etc. Existing studies showed that developers and practitioners are using different design technique to develop e-government websites, while a limited number studies have been conducted focusing on usability and user experience (UX) issues of e-government websites. Again, no specific design technique and usability factors were suggested in existing literature to design and develop any e-government website. Moreover, a number of e-government services are adopted in Bangladesh to provide digital services to the citizens, while a few studies explicitly focused to the design, develop, and evaluating usability issues of e-government websites of Bangladesh. Thus, it was a crucial issue to explore the usability standard of existing e-government websites of Bangladesh and understand the prevailing design methods for finding out the best suited technique to design e-government website with enhanced usability. Therefore, the objectives of this thesis were firstly, to understand the present usability standard of e-government websites in Bangladesh, secondly, to find and explore the best possible design technique for developing more user friendly e-governance websites. To attain first objective, two studies were carried out using heuristic and semiotic evaluation techniques, where six randomly chosen e-government websites of Bangladesh were investigated with the twenty two participants (evaluators). The outcomes of this study showed that e-government websites of Bangladesh were significantly suffering usability problems and the intuitiveness of the interface signs were required to be improved in order to improve the overall accessibility and acceptability of e-government websites by the citizens of Bangladesh. To attain second objective, two alternate e-government websites for a disaster and relief management system were developed using best two possible design techniques i.e. Interactive Dialogue Model (IDM) and Card Sorting (CS). The performances of the websites were evaluated through laboratory based usability testing which was replicated with 18 participants following a within-subject experiment design approach. As outcomes, this study found the IDM technique as a most suitable design approach for developing an e-government website which would give better usability in terms of effectiveness, efficiency and user-satisfaction.