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Critical Look at the User-Centered Design Competencies

Published: 23 October 2016 Publication History

Abstract

Public sector services are going through an extensive digital reformation, which intends to improve the quality of these services. A user-centered design (UCD) approach and UCD skills are required if citizens are involved in the public e-services' development. In this paper we present a study in which we utilized the UCD Competency Model. The data for the study was collected in interviews with key informants from three exemplary public digital service projects. We used Critical Discourse Analysis methodology to reveal interviewees' explicit opinions and underlying assumptions about UCD competencies among stakeholder groups. Our results indicate that public servants have favorable ethos and willingness to invest on UCD. Still, there is a need to reconsider the citizens' role as genuine participants. The study also served as validation of the UCD Competency model, uncovering some flaws but also proving it adaptable in the field as a thought-provoking trigger of change.

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  • (2024)Transforming Public Service Delivery: A Comprehensive Review of Digitization InitiativesSustainability10.3390/su1607281816:7(2818)Online publication date: 28-Mar-2024

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NordiCHI '16: Proceedings of the 9th Nordic Conference on Human-Computer Interaction
October 2016
1045 pages
ISBN:9781450347631
DOI:10.1145/2971485
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

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Published: 23 October 2016

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Author Tags

  1. Critical Discourse Analysis
  2. UCD Competency Model
  3. User-centered design
  4. competencies
  5. e-services
  6. field-testing
  7. public services

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NordiCHI '16 Paper Acceptance Rate 58 of 231 submissions, 25%;
Overall Acceptance Rate 379 of 1,572 submissions, 24%

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  • (2024)Transforming Public Service Delivery: A Comprehensive Review of Digitization InitiativesSustainability10.3390/su1607281816:7(2818)Online publication date: 28-Mar-2024

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