Talking to, Not About, Citizens - Experiences of Focus Groups in Public E-Service Development

This paper focuses deficient understanding of citizens’ needs regarding public e-services. In Sweden e-government efforts are motivated by dual goals of citizen benefit and agencies’ internal efficiency. Rhetorical, this is a persuasive ambition, but in practice it seems to be easier to focus agency efficiency and redesign of business processes and information systems than to find out what citizens really want. Citizens, i.e. the future users of the e-service, are in best case represented in the project by citizen organizations. More seldom do individual citizens take part in the project. User needs are, thus, sometimes “guessed” instead of analyzed. We report from an e-government project which started with little understanding of the future users. To overcome this we introduced focus groups as a method to meet and talk to citizens and find out their needs regarding the e-service. The paper discusses how focus groups can be used in e-government projects.