Usability Evaluation as Quality Assurance of E-Government Services

This paper describes the role of usability evaluation as quality assurance of e-government services. Usability evaluation intends to identify difficulties experienced by a user when interacting with a computer interface. Usability evaluation is a key issue in assessing the return from investment in government sites, as it can measure how the services impact the citizen and is a significant source of requirements for design reviews of present services. This paper describes the creation of a Laboratory for Human-Computer Interaction (LabIHC) devoted to assess Sao Paulo State, Brazil, government services usability. This Laboratory evaluates about 250 users per day using different e-government services and can produce accurate reports on usability problems. The paper describes LabIHC’s pluralistic evaluation methodology, composed of four different techniques, as well as the set of recommendations that were derived from LabIHC results for e-government services.