English

Abstract

It is evident that user participation is a vital component for successful public e-service development. However, it is also apparent that there is little guidance in e-government research about how user participation should be implemented in practice. Some high level guidelines can be found regarding user participation design schools but there is very little guidance in existing research regarding how these design schools can be implemented in practice. In this paper we have explored public administrations’ experience of user participation, both in general systems development and in development of public e-services, in order to identify basic requirements that have to be fulfilled when implementing user participation in public e-service development. Thereafter we have applied these requirements on commonly used techniques to implement user participation in the light of three design schools: Participatory Design, User Centered Design, and User Innovation. Our results show that techniques to implement user participation in public e-service development must be adjusted to limited resources in terms of time and money as well as short development projects.