I was in charge of leading a 4 person team for a 5-day remote design sprint across continents to create a product that helps empower voters at the polls.
Many citizens aren’t aware of who their local politicians are, whether that be their mayor, their representatives in congress, their auditor general, or so on. The media informs people of the national elections more often than their local elections leading to low voter turnout in these important elections.
.png)
With the November 3rd elections quickly approaching, we realized that none of us knew every single candidate on the ballot, each of us had different races to vote for, and it was incredibly difficult to gather the information needed on each individual candidate to make an informed vote as some of our ballots had over 20 different races!
We sent out a survey to see if this was a problem among other people too.
Out of the 2 surveys we sent, we were able to understand that people WANT to vote, sometimes they just don't know that they CAN vote - even when they do it's hard to figure out WHO to vote for. Because of this, many people end up only voting in mayoral and presidential elections and they tend to vote for their respective party affiliation regardless of knowing the candidates background.
Biggest point of all here is that THE PEOPLE WANT TO VOTE!!!
Conducting a market analysis allowed us to see how many apps there actually are to solve some of these topics. The only problem was...not a single one of them provided clear, succinct information on candidates in local elections.
As we were on a time crunch, we each took separate pages and sketched them out on paper. Then voted on what we liked and synthesised the designs together.
Users had some difficulty understanding some of the wording in the app, but overall everyone was able to complete the tasks assigned to them - we even received very positive feedback of people excited to use the app for real!
Working across different time zones transitioned from a weakness into a strength - especially once we got the hang of one another.
Upon entering the app - users are greeted with a fun fact about politics. They are also given a clear date of when their next election is (dependent on their zip code - that's postcode for UK folk!), view information on the next candidate
.png)
All the candidates are color coded (with the first letter of their respective party) to indicate which party they are affiliated with since many people like to vote based on that. You can then select the candidates you wish to vote for so you can easily view them again when time comes to fill out your ballot!
.png)
From the surveys, 42% of people wanted to have more information on town halls so we made it easy for them to do so
Learn more about who is running! View a brief bio, their stance on the issues, what role they're running for and what the role does.
.png){kind=icon}
.png){kind=icon}