A preliminary review of interface design elements for mobile electronic government systems

Abstract

Electronic Government (e-Government) systems are intended primarily to deliver governmental information and services through the web. The rapid evolution of mobile technology has triggered the need for conventional web-based e-Government systems to move towards another era known as Mobile Government (m-Government) systems. Although the functionality remains the same, the use of mobile devices in m-Government systems has caused the interface design of such systems to be dissimilar from the conventional web-based e-Government systems. Mobile devices in some ways have limited capacity in terms retrieving and displaying information, which makes their interface design to be quite tricky. This study aims to review the existing interface design frameworks in order to identify and collate the essential design elements that should be considered in designing the interface for m-Government systems. The study analysed qualitatively four m-Government interface design frameworks, namely 7Cs Design Elements, A Functional Design Approach for Mobile Government Website, Adaptive Mobile Government Framework and Framework of information Quality of Mobile Interface e-Government. By using content analysis, the study identified eight design elements from such frameworks. The study also highlighted the limitations of the current frameworks that could be explored further by future studies in interface design for m-Government systems.