Introduction
Problem statement
Young people either do not have the means, or are not aware of them, to express their opinions on municipal matters that concern them as well. Municipal authorities, on the other hand, do not have enough time to meet with the youth, and thus, dialogue between these two groups is insufficient.
Users and audience
Young people, especially aged between 15 and 18, who are willing to express their opinions on municipal matters but have no idea how to do it. In addition, city officials and councillors who would be willing to engage in conversations with the youth.
Roles and responsibilities
In our team of three, I focused on research, from data gathering to analysis and synthesis. I also planned our prototype evaluation, and analysed the results with the team. While our prototype was created by my teammates, I also participated remarkably in the process of defining our experience goals, their implications for design, and creating the concept itself.
Scope and constraints
Course project: User Experience Design and Evaluation / Human-Technology Interaction Master’s Degree Programme, Tampere University, 2020
Process
Initial research
We started the project with research. Together with another teammate, we interviewed a youth worker, who was involved in many projects related to youth participation. Although youth workers were not our primary target users, our interviewee helped us understand both the youth’s and city officials and councillors’ points of view, having worked in close contact with both user groups.
We also explored existing participation opportunities, some of which the youth worker enlightened us about, and some that we discovered during our benchmarking process. We compared existing e-participation solutions, one of which was targeted at young audiences.
The existing youth participation solution was a website that offered the youth a means to create initiatives and support initiatives created by others. Our analysis revealed that the website was not particularly active and it lacked dialogue between the youth and authorities. The youth worker we interviewed had told us that most young people are not aware of their participation opportunities, and the inactivity of the website seemed to confirm that.
Defining experience goals with implications for design
To guide our design work and following the principles of experience-driven design, we defined experience goals to aim for. We used experience journey mapping so that we could have a holistic view of our target users’ journey and the feelings they might have during it.
The following experience goals describe what a young person should feel when using our solution (regardless of the form the solution would take):
- Respect and Confidence: feeling of being heard and taken seriously, feeling of being worthy as a result of being involved in decision-making.
- Inspiration: feeling inspired and excited to ideate for a better future.
- Relatedness: feeling of being part of the community.
The experience goals had implications for the design. To support the goals Respect and Confidence, we wanted to create such a platform that would encourage interaction between the youth and authorities. This might mean opportunities for proper dialogue and giving feedback, but in an efficient manner so that participation would not be too time-consuming for authorities.
To support the Inspiration goal we thought of providing the users with flexible means to ideate, together with more interactive elements. We wanted to find ways to avoid the fate of the existing e-participation website that suffered from inactivity.
The Relatedness goal seemed to have both short-term and long-term implications. On one hand users might get a feeling of being part of the community already on their first use of our solution, but to nurture the feeling, the solution should provide meaningful interaction, perhaps including collaboration opportunities in addition to dialogue.
Concept
The solution we designed was a mobile app called Parti. Users could create initiatives and participate in discussions, give feedback and suggest modifications to other users’ ideas, support ideas and initiatives, and receive feedback from city officials and councillors using the app. My teammates created a prototype using Adobe XD, which was then used for prototype testing.
The video above summarises the concept and its features. Prototype design by my teammates, video created by me.
Prototype evaluation with target users
I planned the prototype evaluation, though the whole team was present in the test session. We had 6 test users, who were all members of the local youth council, aged between 15 and 17. The test participants were instructed to explore the prototype freely, using the team members’ smartphones. As the prototype had its restrictions, we did not give any actual test tasks for the participants to complete.
After the test participants had explored the prototype, feedback was gathered using three different methods: an AttrakDiff questionnaire, sentence completion, and a brief interview.
AttrakDiff is a scientifically tested instrument of measurement and connected to the theoretical framework of our study. The short version of the AttrakDiff questionnaire we used comprised 10 word pairs – opposite adjectives that the participants assessed on a scale with seven steps. With AttrakDiff, we could evaluate the pragmatic and hedonic quality of our prototype as well as its attractiveness.
In the sentence completion method, the test participants were given incomplete sentences, so called sentence stems, to complete using their own words. I chose to use this method as it tends to yield richer results and more insight into the users’ thoughts and feelings than many other questionnaire methods. In addition, sentence completion decreases the social desirability bias, and typically the answers given correlate with participants’ real life behaviour.
After the participants had filled out the forms, we briefly interviewed them to find out if they still had something to add. In addition, the interview helped us gather richer data.
Key findings of the prototype evaluation
The AttrakDiff results showed that our prototype was close to being a desirable product with a balance of hedonic and pragmatic qualities. Our experience goals also emphasised hedonic qualities over practical goals a Parti user might have.
In the prototype test session, many participants had some difficulties with the prototype, and they seemed to have higher expectations of what they could do with it than what was actually possible. The very limited nature of the prototype seemed to confuse many of the participants, which may explain why the pragmatic characteristics received low scores.
The sentence completion results were mostly favourable, but rather concise, which decreased the expected richness of the data we got. Below are some examples of the results.
When I use Parti, I feel…
- influential.
- I am making a difference.
Parti is best for…
- people who want to make a difference, but who do not belong to any participatory organ.
- the youth and if one is interested in making a difference.
I could use Parti so that…
- I could get my opinion forth.
- I could have an impact on issues.
- I will get my voice heard better.
Our concept received some suggestions as well. One participant was concerned about the anonymity of the users, and hoped that instead of showing the first name of the users, the application would be completely anonymous so that no one would get bullied for their ideas or initiatives.
Some participants were worried that especially young users would suggest pointless or impossible ideas on the application, or that some users would use it for trolling. In addition, some participants were sceptical about whether city officials and councillors would even use the app, which would of course decrease its desirability.
Outcomes
We created a concept and a prototype for a mobile app called Parti that would allow the youth to express their opinions on municipal decision-making in a collaborative way and have a dialogue with city officials and councillors.
We had defined experience goals for our design that emphasised the feelings of being heard, involved, and belonging to a community. The results from our prototype evaluation showed that these goals were relevant for the youth, and our concept had the potential to achieve them.
Limitations of the prototype evaluation
As the test users of our prototype were young people who were already actively participating in the local youth council, we cannot generalise the test results to all young people of the same age group. Due to difficulties in participant recruitment, we did not have an opportunity to test the prototype with such young people who are not aware of their participation opportunities, but such tests would be necessary to confirm the desirability of the concept.
In addition, the concept or the prototype should be evaluated with the other target audience as well, i.e. the city officials and councillors. We had such a session scheduled, but unfortunately it was cancelled.
Lessons learnt
This project taught me the importance of method triangulation. If we had not used the three different methods to gather feedback during the prototype tests, our data would have been very incomplete.
In addition, I learnt that the fidelity of a prototype and the structure of a prototype test session should be carefully considered. In our case, the prototype had high-fidelity graphics, which probably made the test participants expect more logical behaviour as well. We could either have used a lo-fi prototype to evaluate the concept, or ensured that at least one meaningful test task could have been completed with the prototype in a way that seems coherent enough.