A cross-cultural comparison of Kuwaiti and British citizens' views of e-government interface quality

It is difficult to conceive how Web users from different cultures can be encouraged to reap the benefits of an e-government initiative when its portal is suffering from culture-indifferent interface quality. Thus far, the e-government literature not only has paid scanty attention to web evaluation issues but also has been slow to embarking on cross-cultural research. As an attempt to address this concern, this investigation introduces an augmented approach to analyze cross-cultural website quality. The proposed approach consists of three parts: 1) a qualitative study of the website using content analysis, 2) an empirical evaluation using traditional statistical methods of perceptions of website users, and 3) a "persuasive quality gap" analysis that examines the gap between the composite scores of perceived importance and performance of quality attributes across the studied two cultures. These analyses were used to identify cross-cultural differences between Kuwaiti and British users' perceptions of e-government quality attributes. While the findings showed no significant differences between Kuwaiti and British users in terms of important quality features, the results revealed significant variations between the two groups in terms of perceived performance of quality attributes. More-over, although the findings showed marginal support for the existence of differences between the two samples in terms of persuasive quality features, a post-hoc analysis of the persuasive quality gap revealed a need to consider not only important and/or high performing characteristics but also persuasive features to fully understand cross-cultural e-government quality variations. The author discusses the implications of these results for e-government design practices and future research. (C) 2012 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.