Due to the growing demand for effective communication to facilitate real-time interaction between users and e-government applications, many governments are considering installing e-government portals with multimodal metaphors such as audio-visual avatars to mitigate the problems associated with user - interface communication. Issues such as lack of trust, the performance of communications, and information overload are common in many e-government interfaces. However, only a minority of empirical studies have been focussed on assessing the role of audio-visual metaphors. Therefore, the subject of this book investigation was the use of novel combinations of multimodal metaphors in the presentation of messaging content to produce an evaluation of these combinations' effects on the users' communication performance as well as the usability of e-government interfaces and perception of trust. The book outlines research comprising three experimental phases. An initial experiment was carried out with 30 users in the first phase, in order to explore and compare the usability and communication performance of text in the presentation of the messaging content versus recorded speech