Abstract :
Most European governments offer electronic self-services to citizens and businesses on a 365/7/24-basis. e-Services are available. In addition to availability, e-Services also have to be accessible in order to be successful. A number of accessibility standards and design guidelines exist and are widely applied on websites offering e-Services. Increasingly, e-Services are designed to be carried out in “batches”, within time-slots that suit the end-user. This temporal dimension plays an essential role in accessibility of e-Services. In this paper, we present seven design guidelines that will add temporal accessibility to e-Services that are being used repeatedly, over time. These are: 1. Overview and general information. 2. Targeted and relevant information. 3. Safety and trust. 4. Support to multi-channel platform and “family resemblance”. 5. Logical process and progression. 6. Storage and retrieval of information. 7. Timeline. The design objective is that it must be easy for the user to find, learn, recognise and recall e-Services as well as use-related events and transactions connected to these. We show how existing design principles from established sets of guidelines support the implementation of these principles, and thus increase the temporal accessibility of e-Services.
Keywords :
government data processing; handicapped aids; human computer interaction; information retrieval; information storage; security of data; European government; Websites; accessibility standards; design guidelines; e-services; electronic self-service; family resemblance; general information; information retrieval; information storage; logical process; multichannel platform support; relevant information; safety; targeted information; temporal accessibility; trust; Europe; Government; Guidelines; Security; Standards; Usability;
