User Participation at a Discount - Exploring the Use and Reuse of Personas in Public E-service Development

In recent years, we have seen an ever increasing push for new public e-services. Such e-services must be useful and beneficial for governments but also for citizens. In order to develop e-services that are effective, efficient and satisfactory for the citizens, the citizens have to be kept in focus and be involved in the development process. However, municipalities face pressure to develop a wide range of eservices, but at the same time battle palpable scarce resources. In this paper, a concept that addresses this problem within an ongoing research project is presented. We express this concept as ‘figurative user participation through the use and reuse of empirically grounded personas with help of persona repository including usage guidance that is shared among several municipalities’. The purpose of this paper is to empirically explore municipalities’ perceptions and attitudes towards this concept. The result shows that the municipalities are positive to the concept and consider it having great potentials. However, some challenges and pitfalls have also been brought out that need to be taken into account and addressed.