Mobile applications for incident reporting systems in urban contexts: lessons learned from an empirical study

Many governments are now promoting the use of mobile applications allowing citizens to report incidents in their neighborhood to the administration. Such applications are sought to sense the quality of the environment thus enabling authorities to promote safety and well-being among citizens. However, little is known about how users perceive incident reporting systems and which factors affect the user experience (UX) and the perception of risk. In this paper we present some lessons learned from an empirical study involving twenty users engaged in reporting urban incidents using a mobile application. A significant result from the present study is to point out how and which UX dimensions can be effectively used as triggers to motivate users to report incidents. Based on citizens' perception of urban incidents, we discuss how to build innovative incident reporting systems that can improve the communication between citizens and administrations.