LEAGUE OF WOMEN VOTERS
Empowering Voters. Defending Democracy.
Mobile Application Concept
2018
The League of Women Voters is an organization dedicated to improving the government by encouraging all citizens to engage in decisions that impact their lives. They operate at a national, state, and local level through more than 800 state and local leagues.
The LWV focuses their education efforts on equipping citizens with voting information through their existing online platform. However, the league wanted to expand their reach with a mobile app that includes why it’s important to vote as well as how to vote.
THE CHALLENGE
Design a mobile app for the LWV that inspires users to vote by informing them of relevant issues and political events.
MY ROLE
Over the course of a two-week sprint, our team of three actively collaborated on every stage of the project. I took on the role as project manager and was personally responsible for creating an interview guide, conducting user interviews, creating personas, researching material design, rapid prototyping, and executing the final high-fidelity mockups.
DISCOVERY & RESEARCH
WHO ISN’T VOTING & WHY?
Millennials could vote in 2016, making it the 2nd largest demographic
Registered Millennials did not vote in 2016
Women voted
in 2016 vs.
59% of men
Nonvoters: did not like the candidates/political issues or felt their vote didn’t count
We researched the current voting demographic and focused heavily on the 2016 national election. What we found helped us empathize with the potential user and understand the issue that our client was facing. It enabled my teammates to create a script when speaking to members of the League of Women Voters.
Our research helped me determine who to interview and how to create an interview guide, as well as figure out what demographic we would ultimately design for: Millennial Women.
USER INTERVIEWS
I sought out potential users and recruited 4 women between the ages 24-32 with different views on politics and general act of voting. Overall, there was a great deal of frustration felt by these women, whether it was coming from lack of trust in the U.S. government or with inactive/uninformed voters.
Affinity Mapping
With such a broad challenge set before us and an overload of interview insight, multiple solution paths emerged during data synthesis. We chose to focus on two users to design for, due to the scope of our two-week sprint.
DEFINING OUR USER
With so many possible users to design for, we decided to create a Cartesian Plot based off of the two most important trends that we found through affinity mapping: how motivated the user is and how informed they are. From there, we were able to define the type of user we were designing for and open the door for developing personas, user journeys, and user flows for our competent and expert users.
Molly Moves (Competent User)
“I think it matters that I vote, I don’t think that my vote matters.”
Age: 24
Occupation: High School Teacher
Molly just moved to Denver from her hometown of Seattle, where she was very politically informed. However, she generally feels apathetic towards voting.
Molly is registered to vote and has both researched and discussed Colorado politics with her boyfriend.
She's having a hard time finding the motivation to vote because of her belief that her vote doesn’t matter.
Molly’s User Journey
KEY TAKEAWAYS
Molly Moves is the competent user, since she is using the app to get more involved. However, she needs an easy, encouraging way to do that, so as not to lose interest.
She at first skips allowing the app any access to her phone or creating an account because she doesn’t want to commit yet to an app that she just downloaded.
When she starts selecting issues she's interested in - her commitment, as well as her empathy and trust, start to rise. Seeing the election as an upcoming event on the app homepage, Molly feels that this is the perfect opportunity to become more involved in Colorado politics. Once she adds the event to her calendar, she leaves the app feeling accomplished.
Nora Knows (Expert User)
Age: 29
Occupation: Human Resources Representative
Nora is very involved in the political world and vocal when it comes to issues she's passionate about. Most of her free time is spent volunteering to help organize social movements and initiatives.
Being as busy as she is, she needs reminders to stay on top of both local and national political issues. Nora also regularly reaches out to her local representatives to make sure her voice is heard.
“I don’t like to listen to people bitch if they don’t vote. So I’m like: 'You did not help the problem, so you aren’t entitled to an opinion.'“
Nora’s Journey
KEY TAKEAWAYS
Since Nora is the expert user, she doesn't have a problem with intrinsic motivation but does want the satisfaction of knowing she's making a difference.
When she is notified by the app that her representatives are voting on an issue she cares about, she easily maneuvers through the app to the "contact reps" option.
After she calls and speaks to her representatives’ office, she is rewarded with the “You Rock!” page. She trusts that her voice was heard even though she’s not the actual person voting on the issue.
OUR SOLUTION
The League of Women Voters app makes it easy to be an active participant through the unbiased, relevant information it provides throughout the app. Users can easily parse through articles and events, tell their representatives how they feel, and use a voting guide to demystify the voting process.
IDEATION, SKETCHING, & DESIGN
Even with two strong personas developed, we were overwhelmed with the amount of opportunities that we found during ideation. Thus, we decided to design studio some of our better ideas for each user flow so that we could make some executive decisions and start wireframing. We made use of the ever-helpful whiteboard walls in our classroom and created paper sketches, as well. I’ve included some of my personal sketches from that design studio below.
FINAL USER FLOWS
PROTOTYPE, TEST, REPEAT
After our design studio session and finalizing both user flows, we created a paper prototype of Molly’s more complicated flow to test with users as well as wireframes for both flows.
Molly’s Flow
Iterations
When we first sketched out Molly’s screens, we had 3 different permission screens built into her onboarding process. After testing, we discovered that having so many technical hoops to jump through can be off-putting for brand new users. We also wanted to emphasize just how easy it could be for people to get right to the content that was relative and important to them. Based on our initial research, we found that the political issues that people are passionate about was a huge motivating factor in getting them to go out to vote. This influenced our final design to include the issues selector page and eliminate the permission screens from the onboarding process.
Molly’s Flow - High Fidelity
Nora’s Flow
Iterations
After getting feedback from our usability tests, we found that there was some confusion surrounding contacting your local representative. Users appreciated the ability to contact your representative in the app, but most were confused by the options that popped up after clicking the "Take Action" button. We made the flow more seamless by removing the “Sign Petition” option and placing the “Message/Call Rep” option on the “My Reps” page.
Nora’s Flow - High Fidelity
FINAL PRODUCT
The League of Women Voters app makes it easy to be an active participant in politics through the unbiased and relevant information it provides throughout the app. Users can easily parse through articles and events, tell their representatives how they feel, and use a personalized voting guide to demystify the voting process.
InVision Link
TEAMMATES
EJ Pefanis
Izzi Galkin
RETROSPECT
Approaching the challenge of designing to solve for both voter apathy and satisfaction during a short two-week sprint was a challenge because we discovered multiple avenues to improve these processes. If we had more time, I would have done the following:
Build out Voting Guide
The League of Women Voters web platform features a Voting Guide that provides users with a “cheat sheet” to help them prepare for election day. This Voting Guide includes a location-specific material including a polling station locator as well as information on local candidates and issues that will be on your ballot. In our final design, we include buttons that would lead you to the Voter Guide, but did not have time to fully build it out.
Build out Burger Menu
On the homepage of the application that we built, there’s a burger menu that would house all of the features of the LWV app (including the “My Reps” page that you see in Nora’s flow). We took some time to think about what features might also be included in that burger menu, such as an About page to help introduce users to the League of Women Voters and an Account page for users who have created personal accounts within the app.
Conduct more Usability Tests
Due to lack of time, we made a few executive decisions based on assumptions when designing the high-fidelity mockups. We would have loved to have been able to conduct usability tests with those mockups, so as to ensure that the product created a seamless flow for both new and returning users.
Interview users from more diverse backgrounds
The League of Women Voters expressed to us that one of their business goals is to have a more diverse user-base. That being said, I know that our product would have benefitted from interviewing users from more diverse cultural and socio-economical and backgrounds.