My Walking City : Enabling effective communication with IT-systems between the people and policymakers of Uppsala city

Sammanfattning

Sustainable urban development and maintenance requires effective communication between residents and city officials. However, existing reporting systems intended to serve as communication channels fail to fulfill this need. Instead they suffer from high user friction, mandatory login requirements and no positive feedback mechanisms. This thesis presents the development and evaluation of the My Walking City project, which is a solution to this problem. The project is developed as a map based web application where the residents of Uppsala can report problems and highlights, with a design crafted to ensure a low threshold for civic engagement. The design of the web application utilizes information from civic engagement research and Cognitive Load Theory to simplify the report process and drive intrinsic motivation. A core feature that stands out from similar solutions is the gamification of the target behavior. Users receive points from making reports and also boosting others, this incentivizes participation and at the same time mitigates duplicated reports. The results from evaluation testing illustrate that minimizing the initial threshold, particularly by making the log in optional, significantly increased the users willingness to report both problems and highlights in urban environments. In conclusion, the study demonstrates that gamification and effectively lowering the threshold for initial use can bridge the gap between residents and authorities and foster voluntary civic engagement and collaboration in an urban area.