UX as a critical success factor for participatory projects: enhancing the user experience to encourage participation

Online participatory documentary project ‘24-hours.in’ (www.24-hours.in ) empowers people to document their city or location and lives, using mobile camera phones and available devices. The project aims to provide a democratic framework for a community vision to develop, exploring the rich diversity and vibrancy of life around the world. An interactive project, 24-hours.in explores opportunities for participation, collaboration and the potential democratisation of documentary production. As part of the continued development of the project we have enhanced the user-experience, for a participatory project of this nature UX design is a critical factor for success. The initial framework for uploading video clips has been refined into a step-by-step process and should the contributor have more than one video to add to the project, data is retained to remove the need to re-input information. For the next phase of development a separation of the website and automated video conversion is planned freeing up server resources and allowing a more asynchronous video upload and conversion experience. Another area of particular focus for forthcoming development, and one that requires additional R&D is the automated extraction of location-based data from submitted video clips. With this feature implemented the project will shift in a totally new direction and become totally user curated.