Best Practice Cases Collected from Ten EU Countries
The EU-funded eUser project's research includes a representative population survey and assessments of the supply side of online services of public interest in all 25 EU member states. The eUser survey comprises data from ten European countries on access, usage patterns, and attitudes toward public services provided via the Internet.
Concise country briefs for each of the 25 EU countries include information on:
- the state of the art in eGovernment, eHealth, and eLearning;
- the supply and demand of public online services;
- the public sector's readiness to provide user-oriented online services.
The country briefs are based on desk research, interviews with experts and stakeholders, as well as on secondary data from Eurostat and other Commission Services. The project has also analysed 21 good practice cases in eGovernment, eHealth, and eLearning from the EU member states.
One promising example in the area of eLearning is Germany's platform "Second Chance Online", which includes "I want to learn how to write" . This online service has attracted significant interest among its target group of functional illiterates, which demonstrates the potential of eLearning as a tool in social inclusion policies.
eUser is a resource for member states, especially those responsible for online public services offerings. eUser's easy-to-use user-orientation inspection tool for online service quality has already been piloted in ten eServices across Europe. Factors like visibility, findability, perceived usefulness, and quality of the interaction are among the most important.
Evaluators using this tool would assess online services starting from the basic notion that there are different types of users:
- first-time and novice users,
- moderately experienced users,
- expert users.
The freely available eUser Online Knowledge Base is found together with additional statistics and publications that are fully searchable. It is expected to become a key European resource for years to come and will be a reference model to improve the delivery, design, and user experience of online public services.