Role of Human Computer Interaction in Building the User Interaction Layer for Citizen Facing Government Websites

Abstract

The E-Government Systems built for Government to Citizen (G2C) services are with the objective of providing quality services, in the minimum possible time. The user experience of a citizen begins from the time of receiving the information about a service and its benefits and accessing the service through multiple channels to the final interaction with the system itself. The end-to-end experience of the interaction that the citizen has with the system can be termed as the human-system or human-computer interaction (HCI). The different stages combine to form the user experience. This paper highlights the present challenges in the existing Government Websites, focused for those under the Government of Assam and the efforts being taken by the Government of Assam in ‘Standardization of Websites’. It takes into consideration many important aspects but key among them being: the role that the interaction nature of citizens play while designing such citizen-facing websites: what are the deeper problems in the system that is preventing its wider usage; how the citizens interact with the system and their experience in terms of usability, usefulness and the level of satisfaction; are the interaction patterns of the service delivery to the users adequate. Are the services being provided in the right manner; do the citizens get what they look for in the minimum time with minimal efforts. Since there are many departments within the Government of Assam, how does one resolve the question that the user is within the Government of Assam website and not out of it? The principles for establishing a generic framework for building effective, interactive and usable systems are brought out in this paper so that these can be embedded during the design stage life cycle of systems.