For my prototype, I gave the wahlkabine.at website a new look. Not only that, I focused on being more modern, friendly and inclusive when presenting the election information. This should give the website a more positive impression, especially on young people, and invite them to actively participate in shaping Austria’s democracy. Have fun watching the video! 🙂

Below you’ll find the transcript of the video if the audio is not working well on your audio device.

Here is the new prototype for the website Wahlkabine.at. I have tried to make the website more modern, user-friendly, and inclusive. It was important to me that the site appeals to both young and old voters, but I have currently focused on a young audience.

The entry to the site is much friendlier right from the start, designed with a positive header image. Here on the right, you will find icons for the most popular social media platforms – Instagram, TikTok, and Twitter.

Next, there is a reminder for the upcoming election and the option to go straight to the voting booth.

Below that, two or more voters talk about why they go to vote. Here, I can also envision a collaboration with influencers.

Democracy is explained here, and its history is briefly told with a timeline.

Different forms of participation are presented here to show that it doesn’t always have to be about major national elections to actively participate. If you click on one of the buttons, you can learn more.

Here is the hover-over map of Austria, where you can find out who holds positions in the respective government.

Below that, the most well-known parties in the country are introduced. By clicking on the “Learn more” field, you can find out more about their positions and values. Afterward, the parties that are less known or primarily regional are shown.

Finally, there is a slider that introduces the different governments and councils in Austria. For example, the National Council with its 182 seats and a displayed distribution of party seats. 

Now off to the voting booth…

First, we read a small disclaimer to find out what wahlkabine.at actually is, or rather, what it is not. Then we can get started.

Here is the first question out of twenty general questions in total. It is important that the questions are formulated in a way that they are understandable and relate to people’s real lives. If you want to learn more about a question, you can click on the small info button – a window will pop up where you can either read a short information text or watch a brief 20-second video explanation.

After answering the 20 questions, you will be presented with your own voting tendency, and hopefully, you’ll be more interested in politics.

In the following I would like to talk more about the interface and the user experience of the website. I would analyze from a basic point of view how the website is built and at the end I’ll give suggestions for improvement, show what are important attributes for young people nowadays and give a small preview of my prototype. I will just display two images to proof my suggestions of improvement.

I would suggest adding more emotion, information, and user-friendliness to the webpage. By incorporating different colors, more images, and providing more possibilities for barrier-free information, the website will become more attractive to users of all ages. By intentionally incorporating interaction options on the website, such as sliders, checkboxes, or hover effects, it creates a mild gamification of the website. This increases engagement, and the dry topics of politics, democracy, and participation appear more modern, friendly, and inviting. After completing my prototype, I would focus on testing it in the next semester to form a well-informed opinion about the “new” wahlkabine.at.

As a practical part of my research work, I decided to create a prototype application for fast and convenient communication with government services. I myself often need to contact the state here in Austria, and I can’t say that it’s very easy and user friendly. Plus, it would be interesting for me to check next semester, when I will finalize the concept, how people around me will evaluate it, whether they will find this application a good example of meaningful application of high technology or not.

There are quite a few examples of this kind of applications in the world, e-government is gradually becoming a trend. Austria also has such an app, but I was not able to try it out because it requires a fingerprint scan or Face ID, which actually surprised me, because in German-speaking countries personal data protection is a very big topic, and here a government app is asking me for my biometrics so directly.

Anyway, as a reference, I took a few apps I found on the internet as a reference, and also turned to my own experience of “What would I want to change? What service would I want to make easier? What is better organized in my country? What is better organized in Austria?”

Bringing together my personal wishes and experiences and already available examples, I started to develop a rough prototype. First of all, I wrote out for myself what services I would like to see in the app. Then various features that would help in better navigating all the features of the app. And of course UX UI, so that the user would not be confused.

At this stage, the app certainly looks raw in terms of design, but I hope to improve it in the next semester.

In this article I would like to examine the worldwide trend toward the digitalization of governments. According to a 2022 United Nations study, there is a positive trend in e-government development at the global level. Many countries have shown progress, moving from low levels of e-government development to higher levels. This demonstrates the growing adoption of modern technologies and improved accessibility of public services to the population.

EGDI (Global E-Government Development Index) – a composite index that characterizes the level
of e-government development in the countries of the world. It includes averages of three components: Online Services Index (OSI), Telecommunications Infrastructure Index (TII) and Human Capital Index (HCI).

The 2022 study reflects improving global trends in e-Government development and the transition of many countries to higher EGDI scores. Thus, in 2022, 60 countries have very high EGDI values; in 2020, 57 countries have an increase of 5.3%. A total of 73 countries have high EGDI values (between 0.50 to 0.75), and 53 countries are in the group with medium EGDI values (with values between 0.25 and 0.50). Seven countries (one less than in 2020) have EGDI values between 0.00 and 0.25.

Upper middle-income countries have high OSI, TII and HCI and are likely to make rapid progress in e-government development in the coming years, while a decline in OSI or HCI values for low-income and lower-middle-income countries may mean a deepening digital divide.

Of the 99 UN Member States with above-average EGDI values, almost 90% are in the high-income or upper-middle-income group, but the remaining 10% are lower-middle-income countries (Plurinational State of Bolivia, Indonesia, Islamic Republic of Iran, Kyrgyzstan, Mongolia, Philippines, Sri Lanka, Tunisia, Ukraine, Uzbekistan and Vietnam); 10 of these countries (all except the Plurinational State of Bolivia) also have OSI values above average. Five other countries in the low-income group have EGDI values below average, but their average OSI values are higher: Bangladesh (0.6521), Egypt (0.5730), India (0.7934), Kenya (0.6821), and Pakistan (0.5658). These examples show that while income level in a country matters, it is not the only factor that determines EGDI or OSI values.

EGDI values tend to be higher for higher-income countries than for lower-income countries. Nevertheless, many countries have achieved high and very high levels within e-government development largely by improving the delivery of their online services (expressed in OSI terms) despite limited resources.

We live in a time when technology is rapidly developing, changing one another, new professions appear, and old ones disappear… We look to the future with hope and apprehension, it seems that humanity has never experienced anything like this before. But is it really so?

It is interesting to compare the ideas about the future of people who lived more than a hundred years ago with our present. Old postcards help us to do this. They show how people of the 19th century imagined life in the 21st century.

In the nineteenth century, science and technology developed very rapidly. People learned about electricity, automobiles, cameras, telephones, and began using radio waves. This inspired them to create new technologies. Steam engines and futuristic carriages appeared on the streets. Some scientists even talked about the possibility of creating a “perpetual motion” engine. Advances in technology stimulated the imagination of engineers, scientists, artists, and other creative people of the time.

In 1900 Hildebrands published a series of postcards in which illustrators presented their vision of life in the year 2000. They envisioned that technological advances would bring new conveniences, especially in transportation. One of the illustrations depicted an exquisite airplane, while another showed a mechanism that moved sidewalks effortlessly for pedestrians.

In 1910, Jean-Marc Côté and his team of illustrators produced a set of drawings called “En L’An 2000” (“In the Year 2000” in French). Their postcards also offered interesting insights into the future.

I would like to select some of them and consider the most interesting specimens.

Artificial wings

Flying is one of the greatest human desires. The turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries was a time of intense search for ways to take to the air with the help of devices different from the then known balloon. Recall that the Wright brothers did not make their first flight until 1903.

What about today? Airplanes are our everyday life, but they are more like “flying buses” than personal wings. Here rather hang gliders are closer to what people imagined in the old days, but they also don’t give you as much freedom as shown in the picture above. The closest thing to such a concept is… a jetpack! This device has already been extensively tested and presented at various events around the world. Will any of us ever use it? I’d love to see!

Motor house

Can’t sit still? Do you need constant change? That’s what people who lived over 100 years ago thought, and they designed motorhomes especially for you. Now you can wake up every day with a completely different view outside your window.

The idea has already been realized in the form of houses on wheels – apartment cars, in which you can live quite normally, if you regularly replenish water supplies and dispose of waste. The idea of an entire building on wheels is somewhat problematic, however, because we wouldn’t be able to get anywhere on modern roads with such a wide vehicle.

Moving sidewalk

A hundred years ago, in the big cities of Europe and the United States, the nobility was very fond of just walking around the city, socializing and exchanging information. A kind of Facebook in our time.

But they thought that it was necessary to improve this process, to invent some means of transportation that would facilitate such movement around the city. So, one of the ideas for transportation solutions were sidewalk-platforms that would cross cities, making it easier for people to communicate. That might make sense, but the version with benches and a roof over them looks even better, only then it would appear that we just invented… the tram.

However, movable sidewalks have still found reasonable uses, such as in subways, airports and shopping malls, where they have the appearance of escalator belts on which we can move between floors with heavy luggage.

Looking at these pictures, you can’t help but think how far people are sometimes in their ideas about the future from the real development of technology and society. It is enough to look at what people are wearing in these pictures.

I don’t think our thinking has fundamentally changed since those times. Remember at least the Terminator, which predicted a kind of the end of the world in 1997, or the movie Back to the Future 2 with flying cars by 2015. Something to think about…