Public websites and human-computer interaction: an empirical study of measurement of website quality and user satisfaction

The focus of this paper is to investigate measurement of website quality and user satisfaction. More specifically, the paper reports on a study investigating whether users of high-quality public websites are more satisfied than those of low-quality websites. Adopting a human-computer interaction perspective, we have gathered data from the 2009 public website awards in Scandinavia. Our analysis of Norwegian and Danish websites reveals that the use of quality criteria is highly technical compared to the traditional usability testing focus on efficiency, effectiveness and satisfaction of the actual system use by representatives. A Pearson correlation analysis of user evaluation from 296 websites that participated in the Danish web award Bedst pa Nettet ('Top of the Web') showed no significant positive correlation between website quality and user satisfaction. We put forward recommendations for further investigation: (1) inclusion of real users (citizens and businesses) in real-use setting in the evaluation process could help move forward the understanding of the relationship between website quality and end-user satisfaction; (2) the lack of correlation between website quality and user satisfaction could be a point of departure for critical discussions of future implementation of public information and services and (3) additional and in-depth research of the measurement of website quality in the public sector, user expectations and the impacts of website quality improvements on user satisfaction.