An Investigation of Readability, User Engagement, and Popularity of E-Government Websites in Saudi Arabia

This paper presents the results of a study that aimed to examine the readability, user engagement and popularity of e-government websites in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia using three evaluation tools, namely the readability calculator, Similarweb and CheckPageRank. The results show that the majority of the targeted websites fell short in the three dimensions. The readability analysis showed that the mean score of the FRE was 48.62 and the FKGL was at ninth-grade level, which indicates a difficult reading level. Only 30% of the websites had a score below or equal to 7 on the SMOG index. The results also reveal that all of the websites had a bounce rate above 30%, indicating that users are not engaging positively with the websites evaluated. The results of CheckPageRank showed that 85% of the websites had scores below or equal to 5, which suggests a lower page ranking than expected. Interestingly, there is a statistically significant relationship between the readability index scores and the bounce rate, implying that users engage more with the websites that have better reading levels. The study’s findings suggest that the web readability, user engagement and popularity of e-government websites in Saudi Arabia should be enhanced to make them more usable for all their potential users.