Investigating usability pitfalls in Brazilian and Foreign governmental chatbots

The usability of chatbots is an essential aspect of e-government initiatives that aim to improve citizens’ access to public services. Despite significant efforts to enhance e-gov usability in Brazil, there is still a lack of research examining usability pitfalls in human-chatbot interaction. Therefore, this study aims to fill this research gap by presenting an analysis and comparison of ten electronic government chatbots, five national (Brazilian) and five foreign (1 Argentine, 1 Portuguese, 1 American, 1 British, and 1 Singaporean), using an adapted version of Heuristics for chatbots. This study examines the design issues and opportunities that can affect the usability and adoption of e-government chatbots in Brazil. These include enhancing the navigation mechanism for dialogues, improving response times to requests, clearly indicating the end of the dialogue, providing guidance on inputting utterances correctly and implementing standardized utterances for the same actions.