"Thanks for Your Input. We will get Back to you Shortly". How to Design Automated Feedback in Location-Based Citizen Participation Systems

Location-based citizen participation systems have so far mostly been characterized by mediated human-to-human communication between citizens, authorities and other stakeholders. However, in the near future we will see more automatized feedback elements, which inform citizens about the expectable financial or legal implications of their requests. We conducted an experiment to provide researchdriven guidance for interaction design in this application context. Thirty participants submitted tree planting proposals with an experimental prototype that varied along the dimensions immediacy, implicitness, and precision. They rated the different forms of provided automatic feedback with regard to satisfaction, and they ranked them in a subsequent card sorting trial. The results show that users have considerably high expectations towards the immediacy and precision of automated feedback, regardless of the inherently higher responsiveness compared to humanoperated participation systems. With regard to interaction design, results indicate that the automatically processed information should be made available as early and as possible to users.