Designing an E-government portal accessible to illiterate citizens

The digital battle has become the most important factor of economic and social development. In fact, there is no doubt on the fact that establishing E-government systems can improve the quality of government services and enhance the citizens’ life. However, E-government projects cannot be successful if they are not adapted to the specific cultural and social needs of the final users. Taking into consideration the high illiteracy rate within the Moroccan population, we conducted our research in order to design an E-government portal for the old city of Fez that is accessible by the majority of the citizens especially those who are illiterate. The objective of this research is exploring the different architectures, scenarios and technologies for designing an E-government portal that is usable and accessible by all Fez citizens whether they are literate or illiterate. Hence, the concrete output of this project is a usable graphical user interface accessible to both literate and illiterate people in order for them to interact with the static content and to use the online transactions. In the process of achieving our goal, we had to discover and create design principles and to test them with real users. To achieve our goal we had to pay particular attention to the following points: • Considering the two existing types of illiteracy: literal illiteracy and digital illiteracy. • Designing the GUI so that it is not dedicated mainly to illiterate people: literate people too should be able to use the e-government system without frustration. • Since it is the first portal targeting illiterate users in Morocco, we were interested also in building conventions on the type of symbols to be used. In fact, the main two assumptions behind this project are: • Effective electronic service delivery has to enable citizens to access government services in a new and more effective way than the traditional ways. • Government services have to be presented to citizens in a usable format and in a human centred manner. In that way, we can express the goals that are aimed to be achieved by this project as being: • Improving knowledge about how illiterate citizens in Morocco can interact with E- government services. • Developing a methodology and architecture for e-government application development that fulfils the needs of Arabic developing countries. • Demonstrating the ability of Moroccan illiterate citizens to interact with e-government portals that uses new technologies. This paper describes and justifies the chosen methodology, architecture and tools that were applied in order to develop Fez e-government portal’s graphical user interface. The results of the designed graphical user interface’ s testing are presented and discussed in order to assess the project’s success.
Revue Marocaine des Sciences de Management, No 7 (2017)