eGovernment – How Should the Digital Administration Look from the Perspective of the Citizens?

The current situation in many administrative offices is often associated with long waiting hours as well as travel times, complexity and bureaucratic formalities. Therefore in cooperation with the Fraunhofer FOKUS Institute the Design Research Lab has designed and developed an eGovernment platform called “The Digital Town Hall” on behalf of Bundesdruckerei GmbH. It provides the citizens with a “Document Vault” (which was developed in another related project) and allows them to use most of the administrative services online.

In this project the DRLab is exploring the topics of digital identity and online authentication as well as taking a closer look how eGovernment platform should look from the perspective of the citizens in order to make administrative services understandable and accessible for everyone in the future.

We used participatory design activities and involved the users throughout the entire design process to gain better insights about their administrative demands and also to identify design opportunities for interface and interactions. The project underwent four iterative stages: exploration, ideation, low-fidelity prototyping and detailing that were interlinked and all contained user involvement activities. We looked closer at the scenario “Pregnancy and Children” and possible services and documents users would apply for in this case. As a result, we developed an interactive prototype for a tablet PC.