Initial Experiments on the Effectiveness of Telephone Access to Government Services

We report on research aimed at gaining an improved understanding of how issues such as language, literacy and previous exposure to technology affect citizens’ ability to access government services of different complexity via ordinary telephony. We discuss user interface issues in conditions of low literacy and where previous exposure to technology is low. The results are based on field experiments with citizens using a real government application. The experimental set-up is described and the experimental procedure and results reported.