How might we increase the transparency of political communication?
"Der Gläserne Staat" shows how important communication is and that designers cannot only contribute to the solution of social problems, but have the duty to do so.
Less than half of the respondents expressed satisfaction with the functioning of democracy (according to a study by Decker et al. in 2019). This dissatisfaction goes hand in hand with a low level of trust in political institutions.
Transparency has a positive influence on trust and forms the basis for opinion-forming and political participation. In this master's thesis, we therefore looked for ways to make political communication more transparent.
We were able to identify seven factors that contribute to this: the choice of medium, the chosen language and presentation, the context, the findability and accessibility, the topicality of a piece of information and the timing of its publication, as well as the influence of information overload.
We conducted user interviews at the beginning of the design phase. From the findings, we created five personas. These were used as the basis for value proposition canvases and user journeys, which we used to refine Politik Alert platform. After all, we designed a click dummy, which we tested in several iteration loops with remote user tests.
Based on the transparency factors, we have designed the internet platform Politik Alert. On Politik Alert, all political documents from local councils to the "Bundestag" are collected in one place and presented in a comprehensible way. To do this, the platform uses a granular approach. With the help of artificial intelligence, information and its presentation are individually adapted to each user.
