Democratic Ideals or a User-Centered Approach? How to Design for Civic Participation in Democratic Tools

In recent years, a wide variety of civic technology has emerged, including applications introduced by governments and social and political advocacy groups. The aim of this paper is to include citizens’ own needs and wishes into the design discussion of civic applications. A broad definition of civic tech encompasses technology used to directly improve or influence governance, politics, or socio-political issues. These tools have a potential to improve the quality of democracy, to reduce the lack of legitimacy, to increase political satisfaction, to overcome political apathy, and to lead to better policies. Nevertheless, there is a need to apply a citizen’s perspective on democratic innovations and questions of how to achieve the democratic ideals of accountability, transparency, and publicity on a local level. Although there is a potential to make politics more understandable using digital tools, the question of how to bring democracy to our pockets remains. One solution is to apply a user-centered design (UCD) process that focuses on an understanding of the users and their needs and context in all stages of design and development. One aim with UCD is to involve users throughout the design and research process to create a highly usable and accessible product for them. The Pocket Democracy project aims at developing an app for following local politics, by applying a UCD process. The tool includes the possibility to follow decision makers, issues and keywords. During the first stage, end-users´ preferences about app functionality was collected using three focus groups (N = 19). A first prototype will be designed based on the results from the focus groups, a reading of previous literature, and feedback from the municipalities and the technical developers. Usability tests of the prototype will be carried out in a laboratory setting, and in the real world. Biometric measurements, such as eye tracking, facial responses, and skin conductance, provide us with valuable information on user experiences. By measuring the emotional response, we can pinpoint usability problems and try to eliminate stressful situations. During the autumn of 2019, the app will be launched in one rural municipality for three months. User feedback will be collected and evaluated in an iterative process to improve the product. The results from the focus groups will be presented at the ECPR conference and contrasted against six democratic ideals brought forwards by scholars of democratic innovation. The ideals of inclusiveness, deliberation, influence, publicity, mobilization, and knowledge production are seen as a framework for evaluating the democratic potential of civic apps (Jäske & Ertiö, 2019). Taking a citizen perspective on designing for democratic innovations, an interesting question is if these ideals are present in the dialogue between citizens concerning their needs and wishes for the Pocket Democracy app? In a later stage of the analysis, the results from the lab study will be included in the article.