Abstract
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.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution.
Buying options
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Learn about institutional subscriptionsPreview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
References
Kuk, G., Gow, I.: Digital divide and quality of electronic service delivery in local government. In: 2002 International Conference on the Digital Divide: Technology & Politics in the Information Age (2002)
Tambouris, E., Gorilas, S., Boukis, G.: Investigation of Electronic Government (2001), Avaible in: http://www.eurociti.org.br (12/02/2005)
Watson, T., Mundy, B.: A Strategic Perspective of Electronic Democracy. Communications of the ACM 44(1), 27–30 (2001)
Nielsen, J.: Usability Metrics. Disponível em, http://www.useit.com/alertbox/20010121.html (15/05/2004)
Nielsen, J.: Usability Engineering. Academic Press, Boston (1993)
Zazenlenchuk, T.: In Search of the Holy Grail: Alternatives to Nielsen’s Heuristics (2004), http://www.indiana.edu/~usable/utips/february_03.htm (13/01/2005)
Nielsen, J.: Ten Usability Heuristics, Available on: http://www.useit.com/papers/heuristics/heuristic_list.html (14/10/2004)
Nielsen, J.: Designing WEB Usability: The Practice of Simplicity. New Riders Publishing, Indianapolis (2000)
Garcia, A.C.B., Pinto, F., Ferraz, I.N.: Technology as a new backbone to democracy. In: Web Based Comunities 2004 IADIS International Conference, Iadis International Conference Proceedings, pp. 215–222. IST, Lisbon (2004)
Chalin, A., et al.: E-gov.br: a próxima revolução brasileira: eficiência. In: Qualidade e democracia: o governo eletrônico no Brasil e no mundo, 380 p. Prentice Hall, São Paulo (2004)
e-Ping-Versão 1.0 do documento e-Ping, Available on: http://www.governoeletronico.e.gov.br/governoeletronico/index.html (Assessed in October 2004 in portuguese)
Governo Federal. Cartilha de Usabilidade para Sítios e Portais do Governo Federal – Versão 01 (30/06/2004), Assessed in July 2004 in portuguese
Wood, F., et al.: A Practival Approach to e-Governament Web Evaluation, pp. 22–28. IEEE Computer Society, Los Alamitos (2003)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2005 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this paper
Cite this paper
Garcia, A.C.B., Maciel, C., Pinto, F.B. (2005). A Quality Inspection Method to Evaluate E-Government Sites. In: Wimmer, M.A., Traunmüller, R., Grönlund, Å., Andersen, K.V. (eds) Electronic Government. EGOV 2005. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 3591. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/11545156_19
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/11545156_19
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-540-28466-6
Online ISBN: 978-3-540-31737-1
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)