Your Guuide to a Healthier Life …
I
n each issue of Smart Government magazine, we review
one of the federal government websites to highlight its
main strengths as well as areas for improvement. Our
common goal is for the user to be able to access govern-
ment services easily and conveniently anytime anywhere
in line with the UAE Vision 2021.
MOH website homepage
In this issue, we review the website
of the Ministry of Health (MOH) which
aims to achieve a comprehensive and
effective health system for high com-
munal health in the UAE.
Following is a quick review of the web
-
site 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 accessed through
search engines. People with special
needs should be able to use the web-
site with no difficulty.
Following are a few remarks on the
website in this regard:
The website has an easy to remem-
ber URL
) and can
be reached through the Arabic do-
main (
وزارة-الصحة.امارات
).
It appears among the top results
when searching for phrases related to
health services in the UAE.
It is compatible with different brows-
ers. However, the quotes of HH
Sheikh Khalifa and HH Sheikh Mo-
hammed in the homepage are not
clear in Chrome (Screenshot 1). Be-
sides, they are in Arabic in the English
site.
The website is bilingual. However,
some information is available only in
English (screenshot 2).
File attributes (i.e. file size and type)
are missing. Also, the number of files
in the English page is different from
the Arabic page (screenshot 3).
The website gives the option to
change font size to help the visually
impaired. It would be a good idea if
text-to-speech feature is added.
Usability and Design:
Usability refers to “The extent to
which a product can be used by spec-
ified users to achieve specified goals
with effectiveness, efficiency and sat
-
isfaction in a specified context.” For
websites, it could be defined as the
process of measuring and managing
ease of use for users interacting with
a website. A key methodology for as-
sessing usability is User-centred De-
sign (UCD) which is defined as “The
active involvement of users, and a
clear understanding of user and task
requirements.”
Following are a few remarks on Minis-
try of Health website in this regard:
Labs dot com
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