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Governments provide their residents with basic data about the city, such as contact information, current affairs, emergency numbers, city maps or transportation. In the second stage, defined in terms of two‐way communication, where the e‐Government communicates in order to negotiate with the public, scores are very different. Amsterdam’ s, Frankfurt’ s and Vienna’ s e‐Governments topped the rankings with about 60 points, whereas Dubai and Kuala Lumpur acquired less than 20 points. For the third‐stage transaction, where financial and non‐financial transactions were analysed, the allocation is similar to that for the second stage. Barcelona’ s and Milan’ s e‐Governments exceeded 90 points, London and Kuala Lumpur less than 20 points. For the participation stage, which provides opportunity for citizens to leave feedback, make a complaint or participate in an opinion survey, the distribution is greater than in the other stages. Some e‐Governments( Kuala Lumpur, Boston and Dubai) scored zero points compared to Beijing’ s, Paris’ and Melbourne’ s 50 points.
These results show that the e‐Governments of our specified Informational World Cities met different requirements in different stages. Most e‐Governments perform well in providing their residents with basic data, while others could provide more data for aspects like transaction and participation.
4. Usability of e‐Government
4.1 Method
To evaluate the usability of the 31 governmental websites in Informational World Cities, we performed a usability test. In the literature, many methods can be found for testing the usability of a website. Nielsen( 2012) claims that the most basic and effective method is a user test containing three components: representative users, representative tasks and an examiner who observes users while they perform a task.
For our evaluation, we chose the method introduced by Röttger & Stock( 2003), where the average quality of navigation systems serves as the indicator for a comparative analysis of websites. The quality measure is based upon click rates and break‐off rates in task‐based user tests. The goal of this usability test was to gather a quantitative measurement of the difference between the usability of Informational World Cities’ government websites, as well as to define a ranking of the results in descending order. We thus formulated 10 tasks to check whether users could easily access core information or services on the websites. We designed 10 typical tasks, e. g.“ Who is the head of government?” or“ Find information about the Public Library”, and presented them to our test users. All in all, 44 test users took part in this study. Each website was evaluated by ten to 16 users, except for the Chinese websites, which were evaluated by four native speakers. Additionally a pre‐test with five test users was conducted. These test users were students in the first or third term of their Information Science and Language Technology studies at Heinrich‐Heine‐University in Düsseldorf. Starting from the home page, the test users had to record the required number of clicks in order to arrive at the target page. For each task, the target page was specified by the examiner. A maximum time of three minutes was set for solving one task. After exceeding the maximum time, a“ break‐off” had to be recorded. The websites were either tested in their native language or translated into English by Google Translate. The usability tests were performed between November 2012 and December 2012. Via users ' click numbers, the average quality of navigation systems could be calculated for each government website, with the highest possible value being 1000 points( Röttger & Stock, 2003). The obtained value, the average quality of navigation systems, can be easily applied to a comparison of different websites.
4.2 Results
The results indicate that Vienna( Austria), Seoul( South Korea) and Shanghai( China) are the top‐ ranked Informational World Cities in terms of the usability of their government websites. Vienna took first place with 927 out of 1,000 potential points. Seoul follows in second with 876 points. Shanghai is ranked third with 860 points. Singapore with 587 points, Tokyo( Japan) with 580 points and Kuala Lumpur( Malaysia) with 504 points are at the bottom of the ranking. Table 1 summarises the results of the usability test for the analysed Informational World Cities.
The ranking shows distinct differences between the websites. Levels of usability differ significantly between top‐ranked websites and those at the bottom of the ranking. The e‐Governments occupying the last places should rework their usability concept to make their websites more user‐friendly.
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