THE CITIZEN SERVICES OF TOMORROW
– PERSONAL, MOBILE AND MEANINGFUL!
One of the big challenges facing the public sector is delivering meaningful e-services in our increasingly mobile world. The smartphone is a very personal device, so that’s something to take into consideration when designing mobile services. Citizens are looking for personalized experiences tailored to their specific needs. Another concern is of course the cost of building and updating native applications for multiple platforms.
Public sector websites have a wealth of information, but are often hard to navigate. When we helped some Swedish cities design a mobile platform for citizen services, we wanted them to rethink how citizens interact with municipalities and regions.
What you need from a city or municipality differs a lot depending on your current life situation: Young people want to know what's going on, parents need to know about school information and as you get older things like healthcare becomes more important.
IN-APP SERVICES
Based on those insights, we helped design a concept called “In-App Services” centered around a customizable home screen where you add relevant services you’re interested in, thus creating your own individual and mobile version of city hall.
Services can range from opening hours at your local library to bigger things like voting and democracy projects. It was also built around the idea that services are created using standard web technology and then delivered into the native mobile application, which creates a flexible and low cost way of using strengths from native mobile applications in combination with a developer framework in HTML5 and a developer portal with instructions how to develop new services. That combined with open data from public sector enables the citizens to become the drivers behind smarter cities and regions.
Olaf Schneider, Jonas Persson, Leif Rehnström, Alexandra VIksten, Elin Tjerngren, Anton Lundberg, Kalle Jegers, Andreas Bodén, Tobias Eklund, Viktor Barsk
