European Journal of ePractice

The task of eParticipation is to empower people to be able through Information and Communication Technology to act in bottom-up decision making processes, thus allowing politicians to make informed decisions, while developing social and political responsibility. In this matter, the project VoicE establishes an Internet platform with the objective to promote the dialogue between citizens from Baden Württemberg, Germany and Valencia, Spain and policy makers from the European Parliament, the Assembly of Regions as well as from other EU institutions and regional assemblies.

In order to efficiently support the citizens, the usability of the applications, tools, channels and devices through which eParticipation should take place need to be designed properly. But usability engineering is not one single step in the product development cycle. If anything, it is a set of activities that should take place throughout the lifecycle of the product. The overall objective of the paper is to introduce a usability engineering methodology for eParticipation online platforms and its application in the VoicE project. This methodology is a structured lifecycle, which is based on iterative design process with user involvement. Besides that, it will be shown that user engineering is key in designing eParticipation applications.

The usability engineering methodology has been applied in the design and implementation of two platforms in two different regions of Europe. It was usable to improve the system by detailed analysis of the overall system before the start of any implementation, iterative design of the systems' features, their interaction and the user interface, and involvement of users in the design process.