After more than 20 years, the political orientation aid “wahlkabine.at” will no longer exist in the upcoming 2024 election year.
The newspaper “derstandard.at” was publishing following article about it:
“Financial difficulties are cited as the reason: “We have always taken care not to become dependent and to keep ourselves free from political or commercial interests,” says initiator Konrad Becker from the Institute for New Cultural Technologies. As an independent organisation, financing the project has become increasingly difficult. In Austria, state elections in Styria and Vorarlberg are due in 2024 in addition to the National Council and European elections. Before elections, the platform had always developed a catalogue of questions on current political issues and sent them to the candidates to answer. 25 selected questions then made it into an online questionnaire, which potential voters could answer in order to identify possible voting preferences by comparing the matches.
“wahlkabine.at” is a project of the Institute for New Cultural Technologies in cooperation with the Austrian Society for Political Science, the Society for Political Enlightenment and the Institute for Political Science at the University of Innsbruck. Since 2002, over five million questionnaires have been completed before elections.”
In one of my other blogposts I analyzed the platform wahlkabine.at and had a closer look on its usability and pain points regarding especially younger users. Of course its sad that this platform got switched off but I see a clear possibility there to develop a more user friendly version of this tool. Adding some nice interface design and more thoughts of the user flow and target group I see a lot serious potential in that field of digital education tools. Made me even more curious to start working on my thesis!