Interactions - November/December 2010

Final Remarks

France has a longstanding, rich cultural heritage, which might explain (at least partially) its hesitation to adopt new IT and public policies—this is as true for citizens as for the government. Despite a late start, France is moving fast. A good example of this progress is the creation of ADEP, an association that groups several branches of the French government concerned with the development of applications for handling administrative procedures electronically.

In the research project MyCitizSpace, funded by the National Agency for Research, a consortium of three academic partners and two industrials is investigating the deployment of e-government services at multiple platforms, including desktops, mobile platforms, and tabletops. This project has raised very interesting research questions concerning the development of personal information spaces to facilitate the management of data used in the communication between citizens and administrations. Our preliminary results show that privacy issues are a main concern for French citizens, but they also reveal different strategies for organizing their communication with administrations. In fact, some users in our study are still struggling to understand complex administrative procedures and the lack of usability and accessibility of Web portals, as well as getting lost with multiple entry points for the same applications. In some cases, they have

developed personal strategies for managing personal data, such as duplicating e-files in many devices, or creating digital copies of documents sent by the French government, so they can “fit” them into their computers.

Indeed, the e-government domain has a huge potential for investigating several research questions related to HCI, including topics such as accessibility, universal access, multiplatform user interfaces, information visualization, privacy, adoption of information technologies, and so on. The HCI research community working on public policies in France is still very small, but hopefully increasing.

Acknowledgments

This work is supported by the French project MyCitizSpace (ANR 2007-2010). Further information is available at: http://genibeans.com/cgi-bin/twiki/view/MyCitizSpace/

About the Author Marco Winckler is an
assistant professor in computer sciences at
Université Paul Sabatier, Toulouse, France. His
research combines human-computer interaction
and software engineering methods applied for the
development of usable and reliable Web-based
interactive systems. He has been involved in several national proj-
ects on the French e-government domain; more recently he acts as
scientific coordinator for the project ANR MyCitizSpace. For further
information please visit: http://www.irit.fr/~Marco. Winckler/
November + December 2010