Usability evaluation of Korean e-Government portal

Abstract

This paper reports the results of an evaluative study of the Korean eGovernment portal from the usability perspectives, using a common set of performance metrics from user participation. For fourteen civil affairs service sites, 51 participants performed usability tests and post-test interviews. The results showed that even though the e-Government services are fairly attainable, it takes too many steps and long time for users to complete the given tasks. The overall success rate to complete the tasks on e-Government was 0.69 and it took more than 4 minutes and 12 page navigations on average to complete simple transactions. A strong digital divide could be observed in the use of eGovernment services in that the users with different vocations and ages resulted in difference in perceived usability and actual performance. Results suggest that not only are there wide variations in the usability for the services provided, but that significant work still needs to be undertaken in order to make the services of the e-Government more usable, particularly for the older users. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2007.