Advances in ICTs have rendered tremendous changes in the understanding of public administration mandatory. To keep pace with these continuous changes, governments have been trying to offer some of their services online over the last two decades. Governments all over Europe and world design and create comprehensive web sites to fulfill these purposes. E-government web portal in Turkey can be given as a representative example of one of these web sites.
E-Government web portal in Turkey:
E-government web portal is a comprehensive web site designed by paying attention to user needs with the aim of offering government services to the citizens. It aims to reduce institutions’ and clerks’ work load, make government services more easily available, and provide quality, fast, non-stop and secure services for all citizens. E-government web portal in Turkey came into use on 18th of January 2008. It became available on mobile platforms on 7th of October 2009. A total of 1739 services are provided with the collaboration of 289 government institutions (E-Government web portal, 2016). The number of users enrolled in the web site is over 31 million now. As for another statistics, 53.2% of the Internet users in Turkey benefit from E-government services (TUIK, 2015). The number of services and users continuously increase. With the help of these improvements, Turkey has been ranked as the 8th amongst 33 countries in terms of being user focused according to e-government measurement study (European Union, 2015, as cited in Demirel, 2016).
Usability:
With the help of proliferation of the tools that can be used, the concept of usability gained traction. ISO (International Organization for Standardization) defined usability as the extent to which a product ensures effectiveness, efficiency, and satisfaction in a specified context of use for achieving specified goals by specified users (ISO 9241-11, 1998). Likewise, Shneiderman and Plaisant (2004) focused more on efficiency and satisfaction components of usability. They explained the concept of usability with the time required for users to learn system to successfully carry out a specified task, retention of the information learnt during the interaction with the system, performance of the system, mistakes made by users, and users’ subjective satisfaction level. In usability studies, many different methods such as participatory-based design, expert evaluation, think aloud procedure, scales, and eye-tracking are used (Yeniad, Mazman, Tüzün, & Akbal, 2011).
Significance:
Determining usability of a web site is of great significance since users’ perceived ease of use and satisfaction indicates the success of design of web sites (Insfran & Fernandez, 2008). However, little is known if citizens from various background in Turkey can effectively and efficiently make use of e-government web portal. If an average citizen cannot utilize this web site, this endeavor is doomed to yield dismal results. All in all, it is lame to try to be e-government without making its citizens e-citizens first. Therefore, if they are not found to be so, relevant precautions such as arranging information literacy courses to address this issue might have to be taken. On the other hand, European e-Government (2016) initiatives aim to ensure digital transformation of member governments by means of modernizing public administration in the upcoming 5 years. In this context, it is very significant to determine if citizens can use this web site. Hence, the purpose of this study is to help authorities improve e-government web portal in Turkey by eliciting usability problems of it. To reach this goal, three research questions were determined.
1) How effectively do authentic participants use E-government web portal?
2) How efficiently do authentic participants use E-government web portal?
3) How satisfied are authentic participants with using E-government web portal?