Dubai eGovernment to conduct usability audits to ensure uniform standards for government departments' websites

Usability auditing refers to the total professional analysis of a website from both technical and users' point of view, keeping Dubai eGovernment's guidelines as the yardstick.

Dubai eGovernment recently signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with Masiya Net FZ, a subsidiary of Afflatus, a UAE local company, tasking the latter with the job of analysing government departments' websites and suggesting recommendations if they do not adhere to Dubai eGovernment's guidelines and format.

'As many as 24 government departments have integrated their websites with Dubai eGovernment's portal in keeping with our vision of delivering eServices from the single location with a single sign in. To achieve uniformity and common standards in content and delivery, it is important that each website is monitored for usability and accessibility by an expert,' said Mahmood Al Bastaki, Business Process Re-engineering Consultant, Dubai eGovernment. 'The MoU with Afflatus will enable us to achieve this effectively, while we devote ourselves to our core responsibilities of upgrading our service standards.'

The analysis done by the company will cover all aspects of web design and development, from logo placement, colour coding and text colour to missing items, links without content, design dissimilarities and lack of clarity. The MoU advises that a number of workshops be organized for this purpose, if necessary, to update the government departments with the required usability measures.

'Monitoring usability standards has been a normal practice with Dubai eGovernment since the start of the initiative in 2002,' said Anas Haddad, Content Manager, Dubai eGovernment. 'With the appointment of a specialised agency to handle the auditing aspect, Dubai eGovernment is raising the bar on quality standards of the website of the participating government departments.

'As our mission is to offer citizens high-quality eServices, we want to ensure that the user gets easy and quick access to the various services from any of the 24 departments,' said Haddad. 'This usability auditing service, conducted by a specialised IT company, will provide us with constant feedback which will lead to standardisation among government departments, thus resulting in the delivery of quality and competent services. This is a very significant step, because Dubai eGovernment's objective is to have 70% of services automated by the year 2005.'