Direct Democracy
Product/Service Designer at EIT Digital
Introduction
EIT Digital is a European non-profit organization that is working towards strengthening Europe’s position in the digital world by delivering breakthrough digital innovations. In my role as a product/service designer I worked on two different projects in the field of direct democracy.
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Appcivist is an online platform where citizen's and municipalities can come together to take collective action on various policies with regard to.a certain city/municipality.
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Global citizen's debate is a project by an organization called Mission Publiques in France. They organise face-to-face debates for citizen's all across world on pressing topics such as climate change, space exploration etc to ensure the voices of everyday citizens are heard through meaning dialogue
My Role
• I worked with a research team in UC Berkeley (U.S) to redesign an online citizen participation platform. I conducted interviews with subject matter experts and users to identify potential pain points.
• Once the redesign was implemented the engagement level on the platform increased by 40%. I further conducted usability studies to reiterate on the previous designs.
• In the citizen's debate project I created a service blueprint to understand the different stages in organizing the debates and thereby identify the paint-points and areas of improvement.
• I also mapped out the user journeys for the different stakeholders that helped in determining where technology could help making the process efficient and less prone to human error.
Approach
My approach for Appcivist was to understand the problem space first and then come up a list of improvements to the already existing platform.
