The absence of user involvement in the design and development of e-government is often cited as a reason for the lag in e-government uptake. Drawing on our involvement with PortNL, an integrated e-government service for expatriates in the Netherlands, we explain this absence as a result of an inevitable tension between user-centred design – the most common way to involve users – and e-government. User-centred design is a structured approach to produce interactive systems by involving users or potential users and addressing their needs at every stage of the design process. Governments, while concerned with their users' needs, have their own considerable needs to address. We outline four manifestations of the tension between user-centred design and e-government: users' and governments' contradictory visions of the tasks to be accomplished; governments' mandate to design for exceptions, as well as for the mainstream, governments' and users' differing commitments to the law and governments' and users' contradicting desires about the nature of their relationship. We conclude with observations about the design and development of e-government services to improve their quality and, thus, increase their uptake.

In this article we describe people's online contribution practices in contexts in which the government actively blocks access to or censors the Internet. We argue that people experience blocking as confusing, as a motivation for self-censorship online, as a cause of impoverishment of available content and as a real threat of personal persecution. Challenging ideas of blocking as a monolithic, abstract policy, we discuss five strategies with which Internet users navigate blocking: self-censorship, cultivating technical savvy, reliance on social ties to relay blocked content, use of already blocked sites for content production as a form of protection and practiced transparency. We also discuss strategies that forum owners and blogging platform providers employ to deal with and to avoid blocking. We conclude by advocating for more research that acknowledges the complexity of the contexts in which all Internet users contribute to the Internet and social media.

As a feminist HCI agenda develops, feminist analyses of behaviour must venture beyond the dominant liberal feminist approach to include other feminist approaches. Using the personal narrative or auto-ethnographic method, this article explores the role of gender in usability work, a common research practice in HCI. In this article, the author interprets three gendered behaviours that occur in usability work – playing stupid, caring for and about users, and putting on a good show – demonstrating that while these behaviours appear anti-feminist in a liberal feminist framework, they appear feminist in alternative feminist frameworks, such as relational/care-giving, sex-positive, multicultural, post-colonial and Third Wave. The article demonstrates how a feminist HCI agenda that embraces the multiplicity of feminisms necessarily forces a re-examination of usability work’s relationship to both feminism and HCI research methods.

Much has been written on creating personas --- both what they are good for, and how to create them. A common problem with personas is that they are not based on real customer data, and if they are, the data set is not of a sample size that can be considered statistically significant. In this paper, we describe a new method for creating and validating personas, based on the statistical analysis of data, which is fast and cost effective.