#MyBallot

Overview

#MyBallot is a personal project that helps young voters make informed decisions about the candidates they’re selecting in upcoming elections. The project aims to consolidate a holistic view of the candidate from multiple channels, such as objective issues, social media presence, and past achievements.

Product designer

My Role

Pen & paper, Adobe XD

Two weeks

Tools

Time Frame

The Problem

Young voters may form impressions of candidates who are popular on the news, are seen repeatedly on social media, or are often discussed amongst peers. Consequently, they tend to have a limited high-level knowledge of these candidates or little to none on lesser known candidates. Oftentimes it's difficult to make key distinctions between multiple candidates with this limited working knowledge.

The Goal

To design a website that helps young voters make informed decisions about candidates running for local, state, and general elections.
To facilitate a cross-comparison between two candidates to understand where they differ on policies.

Market Research

Several platforms exist that serve as voters’ informational guides. Many commonly function with address lookup searches to narrow down candidates by district. Moreover, many have comprehensive candidate profiles as well as chunks of summaries.

Most platforms lack a feature that cross-compares two candidates by some component, such as key issues. As a result, information about candidates seems isolated from one another, when elections like primaries require voters to choose among candidates of very similar platforms.

Some competitors include:

Ballotpedia
Vote411
Ballotready

User Surveys

I created a survey via Google Forms to assess 20 undergraduate students' voting behaviors and attitudes. There were 7 questions, all multiple choice.

Survey Questions

75%

learn the most about candidates from social media or the news

65%

skim through secondary resources to learn about candidates' platforms

35%

vote for a candidate for every office and are familiar with each person's platform

55%

rated 4-5 out of 5 in agreeing that their peers influence their opinions on a candidate

75%

adhere to Rational Choice Theory in their voting behavior

65%

tend to research candidates around platforms they care about most

User Persona

The responses I received from the survey helped craft a user persona representative of my target audience. The average user is a young voter who believes it's important to vote but may have trouble distinguishing between the policies of multiple candidates.

Adam Bradley

25 • Marketing Associate • LA

Adam is a marketing associate at a tech startup. He identifies as a moderate Democrat. He’s often on social media and finds himself scrolling through Twitter whenever he’s free. Most of Adam’s impressions on candidates come from the Tweets he reads. When it comes to local elections, he makes an effort to search for any websites about the lesser known candidates. However, he sometimes struggles to find official websites from candidates and easily gets dissuaded by sites with archaic formats.

Empathy Map

I created an empathy map to summarize the needs and mindset of my target user. This, paired with the user persona, would provide the reasoning behind every major design decision for the website's flow.

User Flow

Of the survey findings, these were the points that stood out to me the most:

Young voters rely on brief summaries and social media to pass judgments on candidates
Young voters focus on specific platforms that matter to them the most
Some young voters may not research extensively for lesser known positions. This becomes especially concerning at the level of local government, where elected officials often have the most direct influence on a citizen's day-to-day life [source].

To consolidate these findings, I created a user flow that assessed three ways a user can gather more information regarding any election - an overview of a candidate's profile, a breakdown of points that candidates stand on, and a cross-comparison of two candidates that highlights their key differences.

Preliminary Sketches

For this design, I focused on the three ways in which the user could visualize the candidate's profile and platform.

Wireframes

After the preliminary sketches, I began designing wireframes for the app.

Key elements I wanted to focus on were the home screen, assignment/task views, and task creation pathways. Each cluster is demonstrated in the following wireframes.

Final Designs

While creating the final designs, I decided that the "Compare Candidates" page should be completely separate (as opposed to being a pop-up screen). The "Compare Candidates" and "Platform Overview" functions should have the same layout for consistency.

Reflections

It was a challenge deciding on a coherent layout when many functions relied on the address search feature. My goal is for the user to avoid repeating the same information if they've already entered it once, so structuring the pages to fully depict that will likely require additional iterations.