This papers aims at surveying current issues regarding egovernment through the literature in order to assess current state and research avenues concerning e-government HCI research as a genuine research field. Included are the needs for efficient software tools for mass-production of egovernment software, for security and trust, for personal information management, and for internationalization.
What are the specifics of e-gov. HCI, particularly for research? Which salient topics can be selected in e-gov. HCI as part of a genuine and specific research domain? And what are potential specific research topics for the future? This paper, after looking at definitions of e-gov., attempts to provide initial answers to these questions, and discusses implications for future research.
DEFINITIONS OF E.GOV. “e-Government (short for electronic government, also known as e-gov, digital government, online government or transformational government) is a diffused neologism used to refer to the use of information and communication technology to provide and improve government services, transactions and interactions with citizens, businesses, and other arms of government”. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EGovernment . “e-Government: refers to the use of new information and communication technologies (ICTs) by governments as applied to the full range of government functions. In particular, the networking potential offered by the Internet and related technologies has the potential to transform the structures and operation of government” http://web.worldbank.org/.
So far, it sounds very much like an application domain for existing technologies. However, let us look further at what are the main characteristics of e-gov. studies.
It must be also noted that, even though current applications are mainly on internet, further developments may be envisioned for a larger set of devices including phones (with or without “smart cards”), kiosks, interactive voice response, etc. Information Technology & Politics ; Electronic Journal of e-Government).
There are, of course, many studies on e-gov. that concern
important topics beyond the purpose of this paper, for
instance: legal and policy matters, democracy, governance,
economics, social and organizational issues, etc.
On the more technical side, several topics are investigated,
for instance: various statistics, software architectures, case
studies, ontologies, digital preservation, etc. (e.g., [
Often mentioned characteristics (e.g., [
What are the types of HCI-related studies in the literature?
Many “local” studies, focusing on a regional or national
state of things regarding surveys, standards, successes and
pitfalls of e-government, e.g. [
E-GOV. HCI STUDIES Overall, (including local studies) very little is found specifically in HCI (for instance, only 20 papers retrieved when checking HCI bib: http://hcibib.org/).
User needs and accessibility, e.g. [
The applicability of HCI results to e-gov., e.g.
[
Overall user involvement, and requirements, e.g.
[
Patterns, e.g. [
Indeed, from a technical point of view, this field shares a lot with other well-established fields.
A view is that e-government HCI may not constitute currently a specific field of HCI, but simply another domain of application. For instance:
Security issues are also key in other areas such as e-commerce or safety-critical systems; Safety issues are also key in other areas such as safety-critical systems, e.g., control rooms; Overall, it is similar for usability and accessibility issues: HCI architectures, models are not very different from other areas of computer-based systems, including web.
Usability for form-filling dialogues is well known,
even standards do exist (see [
Accessibility is also well known and well
documented (e.g., [
Having said that, there seems to be some topic areas that may be viewed as specific to e-gov HCI research. It may be an excellent field for applying, testing, and improving some ideas, knowledge, models, and tools, for instance: Providing fast, efficient, and usable (including for non-specialists) software tools that will allow mass-production of software design of egovernment procedures applications, quickly, efficiently, and reliably, in order to face the very large demand of dematerialization of administration paper. This has to do with the effort of providing new software tools (see, for instance: http://genibeans.com/cgibin/twiki/view/MyCitizSpace/PresentationDuProjet). Ensuring data protection, security, privacy, which has a strong impact on the users trust and therefore willingness to interact with such systems. In [11, op. cit.], it is clearly stated that, (although only a national survey) internet is not seen as an accountable channel. « Users feel less comfortable with internet-based transactions where accountability and formal response is required. Excluding online payments, users feel that form submissions often appear to go ‘into the ether’, especially as most provide no way to track the request. ». Sometimes, ensuring good old usability may help, such as sending immediate email confirmations, and providing receipts and reference numbers upon submission of forms.
Other topics can benefit from the combined characteristics of the e-government context, for instance: o
(reducing the redundancy of form-filling operations) through the use of microformats, an approach that allows information intended for end-users (such as contact information, geographic o o o o coordinates, calendar events, etc.) to also be automatically processed by software applications, see for instance: http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/artic le.cfm?articleid=1247;
allow combined modeling of tasks and
workflow, e.g., [
started first locally and nationally (e.g. regions, countries), will eventually spread internationally, which will require lots of effort in the area of internationalization.
This area goes beyond the usual linguistic questions, and includes: nationality issues: language; laws and regulations; systems of units and usual formats; collective and cultural aspects: technological environments in place; conditions of use; professional and social traditions; type of work organization; conventions, symbols and practices; modes of reading and writing; personal and cultural aspects: users’ characteristics, in particular anthropometry, education, values, preferences, expectations, etc. A particular topic of interest could also be the differences in HCI requirements for different cultures and countries; for instance, developing countries have a particular research agenda that include content management, plain language, o personalization, low literacy users and universal access.
Going further, software applications for
e-gov. systems could be more pro-active,
which may trigger interesting research on
recommender systems (e.g. [
In addition, for future research, our view is that the domain
of e-government HCI has also some interesting research
potential in the area of EUSI, acronym introduced here to
mean End User Self Individualization. Indeed, it is not
straight EUD or EUP (end-user design or programming) as
the application types are sometimes quite simple and
limited in their behavior, from the users’ end. However,
due to the extensive combinations resulting from both the
large variations in e.gov. procedures (lots of different areas,
administrations, taxes, health, education, professional,
leisure, etc.) and the large variations in the users
populations (age, skills, roles, etc.), one can forecast, in
addition to system-generated users profiles, the possibility
of user-driven individualization (also called tailoring,
personalization, etc.), on limited aspects of the e-gov. user
interfaces. This constitutes quite a challenge for future
research to provide appropriate (i.e., useful, usable, and
accessible) means for end users to perform their
egovernment interactions, with their own set-up. This will
also make use of existing standards being developed, such
as [
Another reason for that topic to be interesting and important is the view that sooner or later, end-users will own their personal data storage, shared partly with the providers (with, of course, the issues of privacy and trust). A complex issue will then concern the capability, for endusers, to ultimately being able to apply different roles in their interactions, in a “personal information space” context, for instance, dealing with several software applications with roles such as consumer, head of household, business transactions, leisure transactions, etc. CONCLUSION In this position paper, we have looked at existing literature on e-gov., focusing on HCI, with a user-centered perspective, attempting to answer the question: Is egovernment HCI a genuine and specific research field? In short, while many aspects are shared by other application domains, we feel e-gov. constitutes a genuine and specific HCI field as software application for e-gov. concentrate design and evaluation constraints, from a user-centered perspective, both concerning users population and software application characteristics.
The potential e-gov. users will eventually be all citizens. This will include the so-called “average user”, but also span from a highly educated technical person to my grandmother in the countryside ... and other locations in developing countries. This is not a characteristic shared by all computer-based applications. - The nature of e-gov. interactions is rather simpler than others, which makes it similar in some way to the consumer products field, including walk-anduse products (even though my grandmother has still trouble with her VCR user manual!). - The potential market for e-gov software applications is huge, when considering eventually most governments and institutions will need support for their numerous requests towards the citizen. This advocates for efficient software tools that will allow mass-production of e-government procedures applications, quickly, efficiently, and reliably, in order to face the very large demand of dematerialization of administration paper.
Hopefully, these issues will stimulate workshop discussions. Another issue will also be to confront the various national and international experiences for a better understanding of both the practitioners’ needs and the users’ reported experiences in the area of e-government procedures.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS This paper was facilitated by the support of the ANR project MyCitizSpace (French Government funded).