The increased interest for user participation in development of public electronic services (public e-services for short) is expected to bring similar value as it has done in other systems development projects. Existing research, however, has shown that introducing user participation to public e-service development is associated with a number of challenges. We have in this paper explored the challenges a) getting users to participate, and b) lacking adequate skills, in the context of three user participation schools. Our interview results show that citizens in general are interested to participate in public e-service development, and favour user participation schools with a high degree of active participation. Moreover, citizens’ ability to participate is high with respect to ICT-knowledge. However, their knowledge of laws, regulations and business processes related to public authorities in general is low, thus limiting citizens’ ability to participate.