Promoting Universal Access to E-government Services — A Comprehensive Conceptual Framework from Citizens’ Perspective

Abstract

The world moves toward the era of a smart society that is human-centered, sustainable, and inclusive. Countries employed new information and communication technologies to deliver services and engage citizens in the decision-making process. These services are evolving and in the near future, we can expect a plethora of new services related to Smart Society 5.0 and Industry 4.0, in addition to more traditional services. The possibility of these new technologies to foster sustainable development can only be obtained when all target users have fair access to the offered services. In the e-government context, ensuring service quality is crucial for success. While many factors contribute to service quality, user experience is becoming increasingly important. Governments need to put citizens at the center of the design process of their services and ensure that all target users have an enhanced experience with the offered e-services. Moreover, e-government constantly changes over time and continues to drive opportunities and open new possibilities for potential developments. Therefore, it is highly recommended that government agencies regularly evaluate citizens’ experience with the offered services and investigate the factors that significantly influence their adoption behavior. However, numerous research efforts investigated the user experience of e-government from the lens of specific government services in an individual or specific range of countries. There has been a lack of a global e-government adoption framework to evaluate users’ adoption behaviors of e-government services. Despite successful efforts to formalize certain aspects of user experience, there remains a need for a comprehensive and systematic framework for user experience evaluation. Therefore, the main objective of this thesis is to conduct a comprehensive study of the state of the art in user experience evaluation and develop a unified framework that integrates existing knowledge on the topic. It provides a systematic approach for enhancing user experience by providing guidelines on how to evaluate users’ adoption behaviors of e-government services efficiently as a reference for future investigations. The research approach was conducted through two main phases. The first phase aims to design the proposed conceptual framework to evaluate users’ adoption behaviors of e-government services. Hence, we have conducted a systematic literature review on user experience towards e-government services and cover all different aspects to better understand target users and enhance their overall experience. This systematic review informed the design of a holistic conceptual framework by investigating factors that significantly affect users’ adoption of e-government services globally. The proposed framework provides a standard overarching process for future research in the e-government domain by providing an established methodology for evaluating users’ adoption behaviors of e-government services. This framework is global, it is used to evaluate users’ adoption behaviors of e-government in any country to ensure that citizens have a good experience with e-government services in that country. The framework includes the most common significant factors influencing users’ adoption behaviors of e-government that represent the necessary steps to enhance citizen experience and boost their adoption behavior. The second phase implies the utilization of the proposed framework to evaluate users’ adoption behaviors of e-government by developing a reference implementation of e-government adoption based on the proposed framework. The quantitative research methodology was employed using a web-based questionnaire to evaluate the e-government adoption behavior. The questionnaire contains a set of measurement items pertaining to each factor that existed