This article suggests a design intervention to the current state of Finnish VAAs. The article was built on previous research on Finnish VAA designs conducted by Isotalo (2020). In addition to providing new VAA designs, this article’s contribution was in exploring the VAA design process, pointing out important design choices for VAA developers, and setting design objectives that address problems with existing Finnish VAA designs. The proposed VAA designs were developed by utilizing the design science research (DSR) approach.
To identify issues with Finnish VAAs developed for 2019 parliamentary election, content analysis along with expert evaluation was performed. The results showed that the Finnish VAAs lacked transparency, user interactivity and visualizations that would allow for candidate comparisons. Based on the findings a new VAA design was envisioned, which consisted of two phases. The suggested design aimed to give users more power over VAA designers in the process and improve the quality of the voting advice.