Task based segmentation in personalising e-government services

Abstract

eGovernment services whilst functional are frequently underused with a recognised need to improve the user experience. Segmenting users can provide tremendous opportunities to effectively communicate with users and assess user needs for a product or service design. This is equally crucial in designing citizen-centred personalised e-government services, where information needs to be tailored based on user segments sharing common attributes. Commonly used strategies to define user segments include segmentation based on demographics such as age, gender, education etc. or geographic information. Focusing on all facets of users is time consuming and difficult to achieve with the huge, diverse user populations of e-government services. As an alternative to user segmentation based on user characteristics, this paper proposes a task based user segmentation approach with an emphasis on the personalisation of task fulfilment, with user segments derived from the tasks being designed.