E‐Government Service Quality: A Qualitative Evaluation in the Case of Saudi Arabia

Government website services comprise awareness programs for their citizens and others, information distribution, and perhaps data collection, online enquiries, and submissions for regulatory or funding purposes. Quality of service is fundamental to public acceptance and use of e‐government websites, although this aspect is frequently overlooked during the design and implementation stages of online public services. Besides transparency, ease of navigation and comprehensive information, these websites require adequate monitoring resources, including targets for responses and reports. The intention of this study is to contribute to the development of e‐government services, and to raise awareness of user attitudes to public websites among researchers, government administrators and service providers, especially in the context of Saudi Arabia. This study explores dimensions that contribute to e‐government service quality, or have the capacity to detract from website support. A qualitative approach through individual interviews was taken that explored four categories of service quality: the system function category included ease of use, and system availability; and the content category included three dimensions: format, information, and personalization. Further, the procedural category comprised privacy and security, credibility, interactivity, and processing time; the citizen support category included responsiveness and contact dimensions. Development of an appropriate quantitative model and instrument is planned to facilitate research into the relationships among the e‐government service quality dimensions and user satisfaction and user trust. Further, it is planned to research various environments and contexts to provide cross‐cultural comparisons to understand e‐government's user behaviors.