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Improving Trust in E-Government Through Paralingual Web Design

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Can web design improve electronic government (e-government)? This paper proposes that the use of paralingual web design can overcome the largest issue in e-government, that of trust, when used with bilingual populations. An experiment was conducted where e-government web pages were converted to paralingual format with site visitors surveyed on their resulting trust in the content and readability. Readability was surveyed to ensure that paralingual format did not reduce site usability (in this case usability can only be viewed as readability as no other functions are possible using the web sites.) The results of the experiment show that trust was improved for the minority language speakers with the majority language speakers remaining neutral. This is important for societies with large bilingual populations with issues of trust between them and the majority speakers.

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© 2007 Springer Science+Business Media, LLC

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Segovia, R., Jennex, M.E. (2007). Improving Trust in E-Government Through Paralingual Web Design. In: Wojtkowski, W., Wojtkowski, W.G., Zupancic, J., Magyar, G., Knapp, G. (eds) Advances in Information Systems Development. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-70802-7_19

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-70802-7_19

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Boston, MA

  • Print ISBN: 978-0-387-70801-0

  • Online ISBN: 978-0-387-70802-7

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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