Title: An AHP method for evaluating usability of electronic government portals

Authors: Dae-Ho Byun, Gavin Finnie

Addresses: School of Economics, Finance, and Logistics, College of Economics and Commerce, Kyungsung University, Busan 608-736, Republic of Korea. ' School of Information Technology, Bond University, QLD 4229, Australia

Abstract: This paper proposes an Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) method to assess e-government website usability and shows the evaluation and ranking of the portals of Australian state governments. We derived six main usability criteria and 59 sub-criteria as well as proposed an algorithm to synthesise the overall priority of criteria and portals when two groups of decision makers are involved. We show how the AHP model is implemented to derive judgment data by random number generation instead of real user testing. The AHP method is more analytical than traditional methods of simple user testing and expert evaluation with checklists and is efficient in terms of reducing the number of pairwise comparisons required.

Keywords: e-government portals; Australian state governments; usability evaluation; analytical hierarchy process; AHP; user testing; decision making; Australia; website evaluation.

DOI: 10.1504/EG.2011.042811

Electronic Government, an International Journal, 2011 Vol.8 No.4, pp.343 - 362

Published online: 04 Oct 2011 *

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