earticle

영어

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 websites is essential for improving websites. 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 websites 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 websites. 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 websites, but the weighting mechanism differs between criteria and websites. 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.