Thanks to freepik.com for the mockups throughout this case study.
Overview
Voting in person is inconvenient, voting by mail is slow, and the human species is going through the Digital Revolution. We can aggregate massive amounts of data really quickly, and it seems inevitable that voting will eventually go digital. There are lots of hurdles to jump over to make sure that system is safe, equitable, and widely embraced, but I set out to design a digital voting interface to have ready once we get there.
I started with the question, "How might we make voting easier?"
I sent out surveys and I interviewed people remotely about their voting experiences. What happened on voting day? What did you think about? What enabled your experience? What blocked it? I was looking for what happened, not asking for opinions on what to build.
Through that user research I learned that there are two main pain points:
⢠Going to vote takes a long time and is inconvenient ⢠People often feel like they don't know enough to make an informed decision
EasyVote solves both of these.
Process
This bootcamp project was an end-to-end design. I used a design thinking process, but you've already read the words "empathize, define, ideate"Â too many times today. I've organized this story like a documentary, in a set of five chapters:
My role
I worked on this project as a team of one. Of course IÂ have to thank the research and testing participants, my Springboard mentor, and everyone who wrote papers that I read, since I couldn't do it without their wonderful contributions. No team of one works truly alone, but I was the sole designer.
IÂ spearheaded research, writing the brand platform, wireframing, UI styling, user testing, and high-fidelity prototyping from start to finish.
Limitations
This exploration happened between in the Summer and Fall of 2020. Because of Covid-19, I wasn't able to go out into the community for robust guerilla testing, and my interview recruitment all happened online. This skewed the testing base upward on the socioeconomic spectrum, since everyone I talked to had to have internet access and video chat capabilities. In the future, I'd like to test this with a broader range of people to see how they respond to the app. After all, representative democracy is supposed to represent everyone.
Without further ado... EasyVote.
User research
I sent out a screener survey to recruit eligible people for user interviews. Eligible interviewees were 18+, living in the United States, and either had or had not voted in an election. I did desk research to learn about the problem space, composed my questions, and then interviewed people for about 30 minutes each to dig in to their experiences with voting.
I collected notes from these interviews into an affinity map to create three personas.
Charli
Tranh
Aisha
With EasyVote, the point is to make voting easy. One theme that emerged from building these personas was that EasyVote has to be more than just a ballot: it also has to help people gather information.
So what are we building?
With the insights from user interviews, the project became adding a research portal to the ballot.
In many states, voters are sent pamphlets in the mail before elections. These mailers include candidate statements, descriptions of ballot measures, arguments for and against each measure, and rebuttals to those arguments. During my research interviews I learned:
⢠some people get and read the pamphlets â⢠some people get them and donât read them ⢠some people don't know they exist â How might we reduce friction in the information-gathering process so people can learn what they need to learn?
Whether people know about these voting pamphlets or not, they should know what they're voting for. EasyVote replaces physical pamphlets with its research panel, which is accessible any time without requiring a login. EasyVote's innovation is also making that panel accessible from the ballot itself.
What if we could click on a candidate or ballot measure's name, and be taken to an information card about that candidate or measure?
Five of five research participants I asked about this idea were strongly for it, so I used it as my model. Many people I've talked to in passing since this exploration have also responded enthusiastically and positively.
Could direct input from voters be the future of  democracy?
Sitemap and user flows
The first goal was to understand how users might move through the app. To do that, I imagined possible user stories and created a site map using GlooMaps.com. I marked three high-traffic user flows that I could design as an MVP, marked in pink below, and created user flows to imagine what those screens might need.
The user flow diagrams below helped me understand what users would need to do to move forward.
Sketch, test, and build:Â getting a picture of the interface
I sketched on graph paper, loaded pictures into the Marvel mobile app, and tested them with people nearby. This is an instance where my guerilla tests were limited by Covid-19 (this was autumn 2020). I couldn't go out into a coffee shop or library and ask people to try a task. Limited testing was still helpful, and one of the insights from the Marvel test led to adding a help feature.
Next, I built wireframes. These were not on a grid or to scale, but they helped me see what the app might look like. IÂ assembled the screens into wireflows based on the user flows from earlier.
Feel free to check out a copy of my wireflows by clicking here.
Low-fidelity mockups
I used Google's Material Design to make fast low-fi mockups based on my wireframes. The following image is not a flow, but is afew different screens from around EasyVote.
Define the brand
To create EasyVoteâs UI style, I needed to understand how the brand treats people.
I created a brand platform to use as a compass for making interface decisions. This platform includes EasyVote's brand mission, attributes, and personality.
Divergent thinking
I wanted to imagine different ways EasyVote might look and feel, so IÂ created severalwildly differentUI explorations of a key page in the app. Then I benchmarked them using the brand platform.
⢠Firm ⢠Knowledgeable ⢠Austere ⢠Official
⢠Open ⢠Knowledgeable ⢠Helpful ⢠Reassuring
⢠Open ⢠Friendly ⢠Knowledgeable ⢠Helpful ⢠Reassuring
⢠Firm ⢠Helpful ⢠Futuristic
The beach palette met themost criteria, so I created a style guide for it and loaded styles into Figma to make my workflow even faster.
Deciding color meanings up front cuts down on decision-making time, and loading everything into Figma makes the build go so much faster.
With all this pre-work done, it's time to move into prototypes.
Note: For future end-to-end projects, I'd like to gather feedback from users and stakeholders at this step in the process. I trust my instincts, and the comparison process I used was helpful, but there's only so much weight I can put on a judgement call. It's also worth mentioning that 9/10 user testers from two rounds later on described the interface style with language like "calming"Â and "friendly," so I wasn't too far off base.
After each round of testing, I wrote up a report with a chart of to-dos and their relative importance.
Using insights I gathered in these rounds of testing, I made changes to the interface. The following isn't an exhaustive list, but it shows a few examples.
Before
After
Before
After
Added
Before
After
Before
After
Project results
EasyVote solves for two pain points:Â inconvenience and lack of knowledge.
EasyVote is convenient. You can cast your ballot from your phone, or any web access portal. It does not require a download, but it does require log in credentials to case a ballot.
EasyVote makes it easy to access information.You can do research without logging in. Once you're in the "voting booth," you can also click on things in the ballot to learn about them. No more random guesswork!
Mockups and sales copy
Below I've created some mockups with sample sales copy that can be used to pitch EasyVote to new users:
EasyVote is more than a ballot:Â it's also a research platform. You can find any information you need to make an informed choice at the polls. Learn all about candidates' platforms, how they'll vote, and what those ballot measures are all about before you make your choice. You won't need to log in to access the research platform; that's always available. Info pages are also available with a single click from the ballot itself!
Log in to a secure system, cast your vote, and post your "I VOTED!"Â sticker to social media. Access information about each candidate and ballot measure from inside the ballot with a tap of your finger.
EasyVote will be one unified system for voters, candidates, and admins.
Vote for a moment, then continue with your day! Shouldn't it be easy to have a voice in democracy?
Next up from a design perspective
This project is a proof-of-concept, and there is a lot more to do to build it into a fully viable app design. Some of the next tasks will be:
⢠Design a meticulously planned and well executed onboarding flow to teach new users how to use EasyVote. For a system like this to succeed it needs to cater to all people across the nation, including the elderly and people with low digital literacy and little to no English skills.
⢠Design the entire candidate portal.
⢠Design more sections of the administrator portal. Are there more actions that admins will need to do?
⢠I recommend more testing with different types of populations. What about language translations? What concerns haven't we thought of?
Next up in rollout logistics
There are political, logistical, and technological hurdles to be cleared before a system like EasyVote can be implemented. Here are some of the questions that need to be answered:
⢠What about security? (This is a real concern, but did you know that you can already vote by email in 19 US states?) â ⢠Lots of people feel uncomfortable with entering their SSID# into an app. How will we assign unique Voter IDs? â ⢠How do we make sure the process is equitable? â ⢠How do we organize volunteers and poll workers to get the vote to people without smartphones or physical addresses?
There are lots of product ecosystem and rollout issues to solve for if this project is going to move forward, but those issues are worth tackling. The bigger question is this:
Do we want democracy to thrive in the Digital Age?
Takeaways
I think there is real potential to make strides forward in voting technology. The core of this design was making the voting pamphlet accessible from the ballot itself. Click on a name, read about their platform. That's a bold innovation that seems really obvious now that it's been said out loud.
I'm glad I had the opportunity to work on this idea, and I'm grateful to all of the interviewees, previous researchers and journalists whose work I read while doing desk research, user testers, UX mentors, family, friends, and colleagues, freepik.com for all of the gorgeous mockup frames, and to the future designers, devs, and bold lawmakers who will help bring this type of system to the public. â A major thing I learned while doing this project was that I want to involve users more often in more places through the process. I want to be constantly testing things with them at every step of the way. Covid-19 also placed a severe limitation on my access to human beings, but in future projects I'd like to take the process into the field to gather more unbiased feedback. I also want success metrics, so that I can have an objective way to know what is a critical, major, or minor concern.
This project was started with a simple question, and I want you to remember it:
