Cultural Usability of E-Government Portals: A Comparative Analysis of Job Seeking Web Portals Between Saudi Arabia and the United States

Saudi Arabia has obtained a very high e-government index value for the first time in 2020. However, there is a need to address the multicultural requirements in the design of the e-government services. In this paper, we investigated the multicultural usability of the Saudi job seeking web portal, “Taqat”, compared to the United States (US) job seeking web portal, “USAJOBS”, from the perspective of Saudi and US citizens. We assessed the compatibility of both portals with the US web design guidelines (USWDS). The Saudi web portal lacks only three out of nineteen US design guidelines. Then, we conducted a user study with 200 participants, 100 Saudi citizens, and 100 US citizens using a web-based survey instrument with twenty close-ended questions measured on five-point Likert scale and Nielsen’s ten heuristic usability principles. The results of the Mann-Whitney U test revealed a significant multicultural gap in the usability of the Saudi web portal design compared to the US web portal. Future efforts and investigations are highly needed to reduce the multicultural differences in the usability and adoption of the Saudi job seeking web portal.