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.
