Using Heuristics for Assessing the Usability of the Public Information Bulletins in Poland

摘要

Increasing attention is being paid to the usability of public administration websites. Websites of this kind should offer appropriate functionality as well as being accessible to their users. This, among other things, is due to the many regulations introduced by countries' governments. The aim of this paper is to present the most common usability errors identified on the websites of public administration units and the preliminary results of the assessment of the usability of Polish twenty largest cities' Public Information Bulletin websites with the use of the heuristic evaluation. The study was conducted according to the heuristics method proposed by J. Nielsen. The main groups of errors affecting the usability of such websites were identified. Each of the error groups was assessed by an expert in terms of its importance for the overall assessment of the website's usefulness. On this basis, the categories were assigned ranks from 1 to 5. This enabled indicating errors on the websites under study, as well as performing a comparison of the websites of the Public Information Bulletin of selected cities. The contribution of the article consists in the proposal of fourteen categories of heuristics for testing the usability and accessibility of public administration websites. The article presents a survey of public administration websites (on the example of the Public Information Bulletin in Poland) using the proposed heuristics.