VOTE: A voting app concept for a General Assembly UX course
Your all-in-one app for researching candidates and voting in upcoming elections
Overview
In October of 2020, I began my UX course through General Assembly which happened to be right before the November presidential election. When given the option to create my own app, I took it upon myself to think, what do people really need right now? That’s when I began the voting app concept.
Duration: October 1, 2020 to January 1, 2021
Role & Responsibilities
Role: UX Designer
Responsibilities: User Interviews, Affinity Mapping, Feature Prioritization, Problem Statements, How Might We Statements, User Persona, User Flow, Sketching, Wireframing, Mockups, Usability Testing and Insights, Style Guide, and Prototyping
Tools
Figma, Maze, Adobe Creative Suite, Google Suite, Zoom, and Slack
Client
General Assembly UX Course/Mock Voters
Context
In the fall of 2020 during the height of the pandemic, many of us were getting prepared to vote in the upcoming November Presidential election. This meant checking to see if you’re registered to vote, looking for fact-checked information while researching candidates, and with the news of absentee ballots being tampered with, actually having to leave your home to secure your vote. Voting shouldn’t be this hard!
That’s when it occurred to me. Why not create an app that with the right honesty and security, could allow you to check your voter registration, search for independent fact-checked information on candidates, and vote right from home.
Thus came the app concept: VOTE
User Interviews
Before I hopped on a Zoom call to perform user interviews, I wrote down some topics around the voting process. These topics helped me dive down into a more defined opening statement, warm-up questions, and debriefing questions to make sure I was well prepared for the interview. In hopes of getting a wide range of responses I recruited 3 users that range in age, political party, and geographical background,
Research goal: To understand user’s pain points, wants, and needs on voting
Affinity Mapping
After speaking to all of the users I organized the feedback using affinity mapping. Some of the major pain points and themes included:
The largest group is “How I Research Candidates”
The largest trend emerging from the exercise is that users want a reliable, fact checked information when researching a candidate
Users aren’t sure if their vote counts/has been counted
Problem Statement
Voters need a way to find factual, unbiased information in an easy way because they ultimately want to make the right decision when voting
User Persona
Using the insight I gathered from my user interviews and problem statement, I focused on creating a user persona that captured the user’s needs, goals, frustrations, behaviors, and more.
Meet Jessica Wright, a full-time teacher who has a hard time finding unbiased, fact-checked information on candidates. Having to look around for all of this information takes so much time out of her day. She’s looking for a reliable, unbiased platform that will allow her to vote from home.
User Flows
Using the insight I gathered from my user interviews and problem statement, I focused on creating a user persona that captured the user’s needs, goals, frustrations, behaviors, and more.
Meet Jessica Wright, a full-time teacher who has a hard time finding unbiased, fact-checked information on candidates. Having to look around for all of this information takes so much time out of her day. She’s looking for a reliable, unbiased platform that will allow her to vote from home.
Wireframing
Referencing my sitemap and task flows, I created mid-fidelity wireframes. I prioritized creating the following pages for Sustainable Partners: Home, Intake Form, Search, Profile, and Personal Dashboard. After creating a user flow for the app’s primary task I started sketching what those screens might look like.
I quickly moved on to more mid-fidelity wireframes which then opened the door for user testing.
Usability Tasks
By conducting usability tests with the 3 participants I was able to refine what users found useful and work on sections they found confusing. They were given directions to follow the two tasks below using a prototype of the mid-fidelity wireframes.
“1. The online polls are now open and you want to cast your ballot for all democrats. Show me how you’d do that.”
“2. Donald Trump claims that he has paid millions of dollars in taxes. Show me how you’d find out if this is true or not.”
Key Insights
Users were confused on how to accomplish task 2 leading me to rethink the search experience. I also noticed some users were having a hard time tapping a button, leading me to increase the button’s touch target. On a positive note, users found the voting experience very easy to use.
Mockups
After applying the visual design to my wireframes, I created responsive UI designs for the following pages: Home, Intake Form, Search, Profile, and Dashboard.
Typography
It was important to pick a pretty generic and safe typeface due to its language translation, fast load speed (great for users that might live in rural areas), and its recognizability.
Color Pallete
The primary colors needed to be very neutral as certain colors, such as red and blue, pertain to certain political parties and would be used to better indentify which party the candidate belonged to during the research and voting process. Since there are so many political parties, this added the color that was needed to keep the app balanced.
Usability Tasks
Using the mockups shown earlier, I put together a prototype for 9 participants to complete the second round of usability testing. This time participants were given 4 tasks and an opinion scale to complete via the user testing tool Maze.co. Please see the tasks below.
“1. You’ve previously used the app, but it’s time to vote again. Please sign in.”
“While filling out your ballot, you want to learn about Joe Biden’s stance on “Immigration””
“On a scale of 1-10 how easy was it to vote through this app?”
“2. Donald Trump claims that he has paid millions of dollars in taxes. Show me how you’d find out if this is true or not.”
“Return back to the Presidential section of the ballot and continue voting for all Democratic candidates”
Key Insights
8 out of 9 users were able to successfully complete all of the tasks within a reasonable amount of time and with a low misclick percentage.
Next Steps
A reward system for continuous voting
The ability to save topics for later research and more!
A notification experience