2
The website’s homepage
Labs dot com
In this issue, we review the website of
the Ministry of Social Affairs. The website
helps the Ministry to achieve its vision to
“Build a coherent and cohesive commu-
nity that adapts to positive changes and is
a leading participant in development.”
Below is a quick review of the website in
three main areas: Accessibility, Usability
and Design, and Content.
Accessibility:
Accessibility refers to providing a website
that is comaptible with a wide range of
web browsers. The URL should be easy
to remember and the website easily ac-
cessed through search engines. People
with special needs should be able to use
the website with no difficulty.
Below are a few remarks on the web-
site in this regard:
The website has an easy to remember
URL (
). However, we
couldn’t reach the website through the top
Arabic domain (.Emarat).
It appears among top results when search-
ing for phrases related to social services in
the UAE.
The website provides the option to in-
crease font size. It also provides text-to-
speech tool to help the visually impaired.
File attributes (i.e. file size and type) are
missing from downloadable files.
Some menu items in English are not clear
(i.e. Netrabat under eServices)
Usability and Design:
Usability refers to “The extent to which a
product can be used by specified users to
achieve specified goals with effectiveness,
efficiency and satisfaction in a specified
context.” For websites, it could be defined
as the process of measuring and manag-
ing ease of use for users interacting with
a website.
Below are a few remarks on the web-
site in this regard:
Placing (government.ae) logo in the main
banner at the same level as the Ministry’s
logo, does not agree with the Federal
Government Web Guidelines. An ad ban-
ner in the homepage makes the website
more commerical (screenshot 1).
The sitemap is well organised and helps
I
n each issue of the Smart Government magazine, we re-
view one of the government websites to highlight its main
strengths as well as areas for improvement. Our common
goal is to give the user easy access to access government
services anytime, anywhere, in line with the UAE Vision
2021.
Good eServices, but poor presentation
