Navigating E-Government: Older Adults’ Strategies and Barriers in Accessing State Social Benefits

The socio-material constitution of e-government websites for citizens in later life requires a deep understanding of the everyday life of older people, as well as recognition of ‘successful aging’ in relation to technology. Building on Nielsen and Langstrup (2018) concept of tactics of material participation’, we examined the creative processes through which technologies are shaped and obtain meaning. Thus, we sought to discern designers’ and policymakers’ implicit assumptions about appropriate navigation in an e-government website. We extend current scholarship by applying qualitative methods to examine the intuitive strategies that older adults applied when asked to perform a task related to rights actualization on the National Insurance Institute (NII) website. Participants included 82 men and women ranging in age from 68–98 (M = 82). Using the “think-aloud” technique, we observed how older adults perform a navigation task on the NII website while encouraging them to share their thoughts, feelings, and intentions. We discerned two main navigation strategies that the participants adopted to circumvent the hurdles posed by the website’s design: translation and contextualization. E-government websites should invest efforts in making their sites accessible to citizens in all age groups.