Usability measure of chilean public online services: an e-government case study

The possibility of conducting public online transactions means an important help to users and a reduction of governmental resources. However, the usage of the digital channel can get obstructed by different variables where the usability of the service plays an important role. This research presents a usability evaluation of 60 online services offered by the Chilean government. Following a heuristic evaluation model, we conducted a diagnosis and propose lines of improvement to the problems detected. The evaluation showed that the online services do not offer enough control to users, the services cause uncertainty while interacting with them, and there is not enough guidance to users during relevant steps of the interaction. The evaluation shows that usability is an important variable when explaining the difficulties of public online services spreading between users and it suggests that interventions in this sense could make more efficient the digital channel within the e-government context.

E-government; Usability; Online Services; Digital Transactions; Heuristic Evaluation