Fostering Inclusive Urban Design and Planning: Enhanced Trust and Reliability through Descriptive Instructions for Digital Citizen Participation

Digital citizen participation tools revolutionize how residents engage with urban issues, enabling unprecedented levels of collective discourse and large-scale involvement. These tools are essential for advancing urban design and planning through individual and asynchronous contributions. However, their inherent complexity often poses significant challenges for users. To mitigate this, developers and practitioners equip these platforms with user instructions aimed at simplifying navigation. Despite these efforts, the strategies for communicating the functionality and objectives of these tools, as well as their impact on participation processes, are not well understood. Accordingly, this study investigates the influence of different types of user instructions—descriptive versus non-descriptive—on users’ perceived reliability of digital participation platforms. Conducted in three phases—pre-participation, participation, and post-participation—the research involved modifying a digital tool and testing it with 47 university students engaged in a campus transformation project in Singapore using the Consul Project digital platform. The evaluation, carried out through surveys and semi-structured interviews in the post-participation phase, reveals that well-crafted descriptive instructions, which contain clear objectives, step-by-step guidance, and contextual information, significantly boost participants’ trust and engagement levels. Consequently, our findings underscore the importance of carefully designed user instructions in enhancing the effectiveness of digital citizen participation in urban design and planning.