Evaluating Usability of E-government Web Sites Using the AHP

AHP를 이용한 전자청부 웹사이트의 사용성 평가 방법론

One of the core issues in the realization of e-government is the effective implementation of a website. The current trend of e-government is developing individual web sites and portals, covering such fields as education, tax, economics, real estate, travel, and health. Evaluating e-government web sites is essential for improving web sites. These principles can be included in usability in a broader concept. Website usability has attracted considerable research on website evaluation and has been regarded as one of the most important criteria for measuring and evaluating websites. Usable e-government web sites make citizens willing to search for helpful information or solve their civil applications. The objective of this paper is to suggest an Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) method for evaluating e-government web sites. The proposed AHP method has two special characteristics compared to general AHP approaches. First, all citizens who are e-government users can evaluate both the usability criteria and the web sites, but the weighting mechanism differs between criteria and web sites. Secondly, a pairwise comparison is time-consuming and not cost effective with many criteria. Therefore for evaluating a website with respect to a sub-criterion, we develop checklist items as measure scales with a seven-point rating. This method is efficient as it enable us to avoid the pairwise comparison mechanism between sub-criteria. A new computation procedure for the AHP is developed that combines and synthesizes priorities of portals in the case that two decision maker groups are involved.

성공적인 전자정부를 위한 가장 중요한 이슈 중 하나로 웹사이트 구축을 들 수 있다. 웹사이트는 평가를 통해 개선될 수 있으며, 이때 보편적인 원칙으로 사용성을 들 수 있다. 사용성이 높은 전자정부 웹사이트는 시민들이 보다 쉽게 원하는 정보를 찾을 수 있으며 전자 민원 문제를 해결할 수 있다. 연구에서는 사용성 관점에서 전자정부 웹사이트를 평가하는 계층적분석과정(AHP) 방법을 제안한다. 제안된 방법은 평가기준과 대안이 많은 경우 쌍비교 방식의 단점을 개선하고, 두 개의 의사결정 그룹이 존재할 때 합성된 중요도를 계산한다.