We’re very happy to be launching the first phase of our redesign roll-out—with an improved look and feel, and a more intuitive interface. In the upcoming months, even more improvements and much-anticipated new features will follow.
The Citizen OS e-participation platform is designed to help decision-making become more inclusive, at all levels of society.
What’s new?
Other than being eminently more beautiful than our previous version (quite honestly, it hurts our eyes to look at our old one, after seeing the improvements!), our key features have been rearranged into a more intuitive and user-friendly experience. Here’s a look at the main changes:
- A shiny new dashboard: View all your topics and groups, browse the public ones, create new ones, and keep up to date with everything relevant to you—all in one easy-to-navigate place.
- Step-by-step creation and walk-through tours: Get guided through the creation of topics and groups with our step-by-step ‘Create’ flows. You can also take our dashboard and topic tours, for a walk-through of the main features.
- Flexible topic phases: Need to have a discussion without a vote? A vote without a discussion? A discussion first, then a vote to follow? You can now set up your topic to better suit your decision-making processes—just choose the phase you want to start with, and add the next one whenever suits!
- Enhanced discussion features: Reply threads in a topic’s discussion phase are now much easier to follow and engage with. The overall sentiment of ‘pro’ versus ‘con’ arguments is now visualised too, to give a quick and easy glimpse of the feeling among participants.
- Improved group and topic content: You can now add header images, to better brand or illustrate your groups and topics! In groups, you can now post a group description, as well as rules of conduct for members’ engagement.
- A better mobile experience: The usability and intuitiveness of using our platform on mobile has greatly improved. This means you or your fellow decision-makers can easily engage while out and about.
- More intuitive navigation: Thanks to our UX/UI design gurus and some thorough user-testing, the overall ease of navigating the platform has greatly improved, and will only get better over the months to come!
Compare! Our new dashboard and the old dashboard.
We’re a non-profit on a mission to bring more inclusive decision-making to the world, through a free participation platform available to everyone, everywhere. If that sounds like something you’d like to support, get in touch with us.
Want to test our redesigned platform?
It’s open source, free to use and available in several languages!
What’s next?
Over the coming months, we’ll be working hard to keep moving forwards—gradually rolling out new improvements thanks to further user research, usability testing and co-design. We’ll also be adding some widely requested new features, such as an ideation space for crowd-sourcing ideas. (You ask, we listen!)
“The redesign of our platform has been a big and exciting project for us over the last year. If you’re looking for a free and safe participation platform for things like community engagement, internal decision-making or hybrid annual meetings, our much-improved platform now awaits you, with many more improvements on their way,” commented Ilmar Türk, the Chief Technical Officer.
“We want to give a huge thanks to all those organisations and individuals who’ve helped us design better features and smoother usability so far—the impact has already been huge, and the insights will keep on informing our decisions in the phases of our redesign still to come! If you care about civic engagement and fostering participation, we are always welcoming testers and feedback,” he added.
Groups view. Several features have a more user-friendly and intuitive look and feel in the redesigned platform.
Help us keep improving
We’re a non-profit on a mission to bring more inclusive decision-making to the world, through a free participation platform available to everyone, everywhere. If that sounds like something you’d like to support, here’s a couple of ways you can help:
- Send us feedback! When you use our platform, we’d love it if you let us know any areas for improvement. Just click the platform’s ‘Help’ button to drop us a message, or email support@citizenos.com. Short or long, positive or critical, we’ll be glad to hear from you.
- Help co-create our platform. Are you part of a group or organisation that has a need for a participation platform, and have a couple of hours to spare in the coming months? Come test out new features and share your ideas! Our latest partners have found it great fun, and helpful for thinking through their participation projects too! Drop an email to support@citizenos.com to find out more.
