Democràcia Participativa i Interacció: Redesign of decidim.barcelona, an online platform that allows citizens to participate, make proposals and debate about their city.
Design Undergraduate Degree 2017-18.
16 students of Interaction (Design Degree), 3 tutors from Elisava (Tona Monjo, Natàlia Herèdia, José Vittone), 2 tutors from Decidim (Carol Romero, Pau Adelantado).
Collaborators
Decidim, Ajuntament de Barcelona.
Decidim poses to Elisava’s Interaction students the challenge of increasing citizens’ participation in the platform. This carries two inherent objectives: on the one hand, to spread the knowledge of the platform among citizens. On the other hand, to design a more usable platform that does not present barriers to the content and facilitates participation.
Since Barcelona population is greatly diverse, the target was focused on people between 18 and 30 years old. Initially, students carried out a research from which 3 user profiles were obtained (involved, occasional and apathetic). Several project insights were also revealed (need to use the citizen’s language, provide confidence, enable site interaction, provide feedback, enhance platform communication). Then, students redesigned the information architecture and prototyped the interface, thorough several iterations and evaluations with users, up to the final prototype. Finally, six different proposals were obtained, some focused on the computer and others on the mobile as the main interaction device.
Storytelling was the initial tool to describe people, scenarios and user journeys, and to understand relevant insights related to the platform interaction. To generate key ideas for the project, Concept generation as brainstorming and blueprint techniques were developed. The final results were developed by Prototyping iteratively from the interaction design (wireframes) to the final graphic prototypes (mockups) constantly Upgrading through evaluations with users to identify improvements in the prototypes.
How can new forms of interaction help make citizens more participatory?
