Communication Analysis of Public Forms - Discovering Multi-Functional Purposes in Citizen and Government Communication

Abstract

This paper adopts a communication perspective on forms in public e-services. This perspective emphasizes that the main purpose of such forms is to facilitate communication between citizens and government agencies. The form is perceived as a tool for performing communicative actions. A communication analysis (CA) method, originally developed for systems requirements engineering, is applied on a public form; i.e. the medical certificate used in connection with a citizens application for a provisional driving license in Sweden. The CA method consists of a set of questions related to three communicative categories; conditions, actions, and consequences. The CA method is used in order to explore the communicative roles of forms in public e-services. As a result of the communication analysis four multi-functional purposes of citizen and government agency communication are discovered. These purposes contribute to the understanding and evaluation of forms in public e-services. The communicative roles, and their multi-functional purposes, are important design features to focus in the development of e-services and electronic forms. Besides these findings, another outcome is that the CA method has been tested in an e-government context. The communication perspective, as well as the CA method, contribute with useful insights in this context.