Abstract
The Brazilian government has sought ways to maintain electronic contact with its citizens, making services and information available online. The latter needs to be easy to locate and access and readily understood by all. This requires providing ways to help users during their interaction, i.e. online help systems. In this ambit, this paper firstly verifies how these systems are provided and described in the Brazilian government recommendations for e-government (e-GOV) websites. By means of a survey conducted with users it also verifies their preferences in relation to help systems in general and their interaction with e-GOV websites. From the analyses and surveys conducted, it can be observed that the existing recommendations do not contain enough information to build help systems and a set of guidelines is proposed for their construction. These guidelines were presented to representatives of the target population of such websites: citizens, system developers and professionals from the e-GOV area. The first results show the possible improvement of these websites using the proposed guidelines; the e-GOV designers could use these guidelines with the aim of providing a better citizen-government interaction through technology.