A Framework for Usability Design to Promote Awareness of Information Disseminated via Mobile Government Applications

Abstract

Mobile application have become the first choice for disseminating information in several situations. Many government agencies developed m-government applications, mainly for information dissemination and electronic services delivery. Information has great effects to citizen’s life in several ways. Warning messages are an obvious example. They are usually provided to people in affected or risk areas. Effective information dissemination of such information requires more than assembling them on the user interface. It requires a careful design. Designing how they are presented is not an easy task. Moreover, effective and efficient presentation can be difficult. Appropriate presentation aids in understanding of information and gives the correct clue on what to do next. This paper presents the analysis of usability factors to support design and development of m-government applications which main task is information dissemination. Existing usability models were analyzed. Hundreds of publications in related areas were reviewed. Then, usability factors to m-government applications were collected and clustered. The usability design framework is proposed to promote effective use of the usability factors in the development process. The framework is designed to support incorporation of usability factors that lead to usable interface. The factors included in the framework are Learnability Satisfaction, Memorability, Simplicity, Privacy, and Security.