A Quality Inspection Method to Evaluate E-Government Sites

Electronic government allows a broad range of citizens to access governamental information and services, as well as to participate in the government decision-making process. On the other hand, it imposes a higher challenge on a web designer to avoid digital exclusion. Before proposing guidelines to design e-gov sites, it is important to have objective methods to evaluate their quality. Traditional inspection methods do not cover the specificities of e-gov sites. This work proposes an extension of Nielsen’s heuristic evaluating method, applied to the information, services and citizens’ participation categories. Broad accessibility, interoperability, security and privacy, information truth and precision, service agility, and transparency are added. The g-Quality method was instrumental as an objective evaluation form. It was applied to 127 Brazilian e-gov sites. The extended method found more problems, resulting in more negative ratings than the Nielsen’s original method. The Brazilian public sites quality level was determined by using the g-Quality method, producing positive results.