User‐Friendly Contracting Tools – A Visual Guide to Facilitate Public Procurement Contracting

Abstract

In order to achieve successful business outcomes, it is crucial for all the parties to know their rights and obligations and how to best react to unexpected situations. Public procurement processes, however, often focus on obeying competitive tendering regulations, neglecting the importance or even the existence of contracts. There is a need to envision new, better ways to engage civil servants with contracts, so that they can be used strategically in achieving successful collaboration with suppliers and, consequently, providing high quality services to the citizens. This paper presents a development case, where a visual guide, designed to support the understanding of a set of general terms of public procurement, was produced and experimentally evaluated with users. Visualization is used to make the terms easier to use and understand, as well as to transform contracts from legal documents to communication tools.

Keywords: Contract visualization, Public procurement, Proactive contracting, Usability, User experience, User tests, Experiments