Dimensions of the User Experience of e‐Government Services: The Nigeria Immigration Service Website
Olaseni Muritala Okunola and Jennifer Rowley Manchester Metropolitan University, Manchester, UK muri297 @ gmail. com j. rowley @ mmu. ac. uk
Abstract: The user experience of e‐Government is regarded as important for e‐Government adoption and effectiveness, yet there is no agreement as to the dimensions of the user experience. Hence, this study seeks to develop a scale for the measurement of the perceptions of the users’ experience of e‐Government services. Since there is particular concern regarding the success of e‐Government in developing countries, the e‐services offered by the Nigeria Immigration Service( NIS) were chosen as the focus for this study. Drawing on various strands of previous research related to the user experience of e‐Government and other websites, including research on technology adoption, customer satisfaction and service quality, a broad based research instrument was developed to capture perceptions of the user experience with the NIS website, as well as other key demographic data. In order to facilitate access to service users located in different countries an on‐line questionnaire‐based survey was conducted, using a snowball sample; 351 completed questionnaires were collected, and analysed using SPSS. All respondents identified themselves as having used the NIS portal, with 50 % reporting their main place of residence as being Nigeria, and the remainder being resident in various other countries. Whilst the questionnaire design was informed by previous research in the fields of customer satisfaction and technology adoption, the exploratory factor analysis generated an e‐Government user experience scale that both confirmed the importance of some dimensions identified by other researchers, and identified new factors. Factors identified were: security and support, content and information, ease of use, benefits, barriers, convenience, trust and website quality. Findings are discussed with reference to previous research and recommendations for practice and further research are offered.
Keywords: e‐government; Nigeria; immigration services; citizen satisfaction; security and support; user experience
1. Introduction
Governments worldwide have introduced e‐Government and e‐service practices in order to reduce costs and make their operations more efficient, and to provide prompt service, improve quality of service, remove barriers to government services, tackle social exclusion, and provide local access points( Praeg and Spath 2010). Typical applications include information provision, downloading of forms, interaction, service delivery, and e‐democracy( Ajeeli and Al‐Bastaki 2010). The need to encourage citizen adoption of e‐Government services has led to an increasing interest in the evaluation of e‐Government services, and the development of a body of research and practice and instruments and tools that support the examination of the factors that influence the user experience. This research is informed by a variety of prior theories, including the Technology Adoption Model( TAM), Roger’ s diffusion of innovation theory( DOI), and work on service quality and customer / citizen satisfaction that builds on models such as SERQUAL, and its variants for e‐services, such as E‐ S‐QUAL, SITEQual, and. comQ. This research aims to draw on research within these various traditions to develop a holistic scale to measure the e‐Government user experience. In addition, this study also contributes to the limited research into user engagement with e‐Government in developing countries.
The next section of the paper outlines previous research in the area of the evaluation of e‐Government services, with specific reference to the factors identified by previous researchers as contributing to the user experience. The methodology section next explains the design of the data collection instrument, and the processes associated with the online survey and data analysis. The Findings section reports on the Exploratory Factor Analysis conducted to develop the E‐Government Experience Scale, and the Discussion section considers this scale with respect to earlier research. Finally, Conclusions and recommendations summarise the contribution of the research and make recommendations for further research.
2. Literature review
2.1 Previous factors identified as contributing to the user experience of e‐Government
The need to encourage citizen adoption of e‐Government technologies has led to an increasing interest in the evaluation of e‐Government services, often in terms of citizen or customer satisfaction and notions of e‐
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