Towards the conceptualization of citizen user experience: Citizens' preference for emotional design in E-Government portal

In this paper we attempt to shed some light on the possible conceptualization of the user experience in E-Government services in anticipation of the growing population of digital natives. We argue the need for the citizen experience in the light of E-Government evolution that is described using various maturity stages model that ascends the stages of informational, interactional, transactional, transformational and participatory. This progression in maturity, calls for the need to engineer the different expectation of user experience at the different levels while serving a diverse users. At the highest maturity stage, citizen engagement through participatory services is expected. This becomes important when the nation's digital natives grow up and claim their role as responsible citizens and expect to interact with the government through the kind of user experience that they are used to in their everyday life. As a prerequisite to the conceptualization of the citizen user experience, we set to investigate the citizen's preference for emotional design in E-government portals in a study that seeks to uncover the relationship between users' positive emotional expression and their preferences towards E-Government portal that exhibits emotional design features. In our study, 120 participants took part in emotive evaluation procedures. Majority of them are digital natives. Our findings showed that the participants have a preference for E-Government portals that exhibit emotional design features.