Cultural User Experience Issues in E-government: Designing for a Multi-cultural Society

This paper examines the influences of culture on the user experience of local e-government services. It investigates the hypothesis that people with different cultural backgrounds experience different problems when using egovernment applications. Thirty participants with the Moroccan, Surinamese and Dutch cultural background were first asked to fill in a short questionnaire for demographic purposes. They were then observed while carrying out three tasks on a local e-government website. After the three tasks were completed, a short interview took place to investigate user experience issues in more depth. By referring to existing literature on cross-cultural values and norms, the reasons behind the differences in user experience problems for the cultural groups were explored. The findings suggest that differences in user problems coincide with expectations based on cultural characteristics from the literature. The findings of this paper support the notion that users with different cultural backgrounds experience different user problems.