INTRODUCTION:

I really enjoyed this case study. It was amazing to start with a problem and end up with a product. The design process my team chose to follow pushed me to challenge my assumptions and learn how to innovate new ideas along the way.

PROBLEM:

A report released by the Pew Research Center shows that for the first time ever, Millennial and Gen X voters outnumbered Boomers and older voters, 69.6 million to 67.9 million. This gap will only widen in future elections: death and infirmity will steadily thin the ranks of older cohorts while rising turnout rates among younger voters will continue to swell their share of the electorate.

With more and more millennials coming of age to vote in the next couple years, what can be done to get more millennials to the polls?

GOAL:

Our goal was to not only design a web application that would get millennials to the polls, but encourage and motivate more individuals to vote.

Yikes, is that impossible you ask? Don’t worry we had a plan.

STRATEGY:

We decided to approach this challenge by using the Stanford Design Thinking Process. We chose this method because we felt that it best helped us understand and evaluate our ideas before we could could start to try and turn them into reality.

EMPATHIZE:

How did our team tackle such a complex issue?

It was important for my team to understand the user. We needed to not only understand the logistical pain points each person was having with casting their vote, but understand the emotional connection that each individual millennial had to voting and how that was positively or negatively contributing to their voting experience.

What we wanted to know?

• Why do or don’t you vote?
• What influenced your decision to vote or not vote?
• Do you feel like an educated voter?
• Do you think your vote counts on a bigger scale?
• Do you know how to vote?

EMPATHIZE: Research

I needed to understand the exact experience everyone was going through as they decided to vote or not vote, and what that experience felt like for each user.

SURVEY: My team and I decided to send out a survey to over a 100 users. In our survey we asked questions like…

“Do you know how to vote?”

“Are you registered to vote?”

“Do you feel social pressure to vote?”

“When was the last time you voted?”

“What does your voting process look like?”

Through questions like these we were able to not only gather data that helped us understand each user and how they felt about voting, but were able to also understand what their actual voting habits were. We found that every person thought they were more politically involved than their habits actually portrayed.

We quickly found out that those who took our survey with real intention already cared about voting and were active civic participants. My team decided to send out an Instagram survey in order to limit our audience and narrow our scope.

USER INTERVIEWS: My team and I interviewed a total of 8 millennials about what voting actually looked like for them.

Here is what we found…

• The process of voting had lots of misguiding information.
• Voters felt insecure casting an uneducated vote, but did not know where to go in order to become a more educated voter.
• Lots of users wanted to participate socially in voting discussions, and felt a “good social pressure” to vote.
• Most users felt it was important to vote, but not important enough to fit into their day.
• Users did not like having to sift through several different “voting paths” in order to find one that fit their individual situation.

COMPETITIVE RESEARCH: Along with interviews, we conducted several sessions where we observed users going through the process of a)voting online or b) registering to vote online and took note of their major pain points and frustrations as they fought to accomplish a seemingly simple task.

DEFINE: Narrowing it down

From here we began to analyze the raw data from our interviews, surveys, and competitive research. What were our voters main pain points? What were their goals or “jobs to be done”?

The biggest opticals we found for millennial voters making it to the polls were…

While understanding our users goals we knew it was practically impossible for us to change a nation wide process. So we had to look at the issue through a different lens. We had to find a way to work under the limitations that were set by the process of voting that was already in place.

We decided the way to best motivate our users to act would be to help them become an informed voter, and make the voting process individualized enough that it was easy to understand and fit into a busy day.

DEFINE: Persona

We decided to focus in on a couple of the pain points and goals from our data and started to establish our MVP.

Voting can be a very complex rabbit hole to fall in. Creating our persona helped us not only to focus on our MVP, but to help us have empathy and understanding for the users we were creating for.

Meet Amy Walton…

From here on out, I ate, breathed, and thought Amy. To understand her was to understand and focus into our project. Every design decision from here on out was Amy based and focused.

Our team wanted to help ease her pains and satisfy her goals.

IDEATE

We knew that it was impossible to change the voting process, but we could reorganize the structure and make it personal enough to where it seemed a lot more convent. We wanted our users to feel directed through the site, almost as if they were being walked through it by voting expert.

From here we needed to decide what features would become most important.

Amy had to be able to…

1. Prepare to vote (part of this includes aspects of the social pressure, and helping her become an informed voter).
2. Get registered to vote.
3. VOTE!!

PROTOTYPE: Skeleton

As we began to sketch out ideas, we decided to challenge each member of our team to come up with their own unique idea of what our interface was going to look like. We did this with a crazy 8 method.

After this we came together and examined the things that Amy would like the most, and the components that spoke most clearly to our research. Here is what we came up with…

TEST: User Testing

At this point we decided we would go out with our screens and test the validity of them. We wanted to see when and where users got stuck, if they felt supported, and if they were able to make it through the voting process feeling confident.

We started out by having our users sign into the site before they could register to vote, or even check to see if they had a valid registration. Our original thought was that this would help users feel that their information was safe with us if they could sign in before hand.

Have you ever been stopped in the mall and asked to sign up for the latest and greatest new gadget before they even told you what it was?

Yeah, me neither. So why would we have our website interact the same way?

Here is what we found:

• Our landing page was too busy, and many users expressed the concern for the same information overload they felt on government websites.
• Our side navigation make things more confusing for users, and many got stuck or lost.
• Users did not enjoy signing in before they were able to get value from the site.
• Our progress bar created confusion for users instead of add to their comfort while moving through the voting process.

Here is what we did about it:

• We simplified our landing page. Used a visual hierarchy to represent what was most important to our users, and added illustrations to help users feel more calm.
• We switched around some pages. We decided we could have users check their registration before they even got into creating an account. We found a way to add immediate value to their experience.
• We got rid of the side navigation and worked it into our dashboard, we make it a ‘one stop shop’ for all of their needs and navigation. Our dashboard was visual enough for users to sign in quickly and immediately see what needed to be done.
• We adjusted our progress tracker to make it easier for users to visually see exactly where they were at in their individual voting process.

Before and after user testing

Before and after user testing

KEY INSIGHTS :

1. A small change can make a huge difference. Something that stuck out to me the most was how often users got confused with our progress tracker, a simple change in the design put users at ease.
2. Value can be added to a users experience in non conventional ways. Our original landing page was busy, but satisfied every “job” our user had to get done in one spot. We quickly realized that our users were most interested in feeling guided and comfortable while voting rather than having every “job to be done” checked off their list immediately. We were playing the long game.
3. Simplicity can come in several different forms. We originally added a side navigation in order to make our page more simple. We found deep into our 4th round of testing that creating a dashboard that had everything on one page that they needed, although visually busy, created a simplicity in the users mind that help them accomplish their task faster.

Branding

Although blue is often used in politics, we wanted to created a much softer and more soothing feel for our users. We wanted the tone of our website to be calming yet motivating, hence why we chose a color pallet of blues that soothed yet excited.

GUIDING PRINCIPLES:

• Personalized
• Familiar and encouraging

This is VoteNOW. A voting website targeted specifically for millennials. VoteNOW is a simple and encouraging. The intention was to create a personalized experience where users could know exactly what they needed to get done in order to vote. This was achieved through simple colors, a strong visual hierarchy, and most importantly, by listening to our users.

CONCLUSION

My team was presented with the challenge of helping millennial voters not only get to the polls but to create a more pleasant experience while they were there.

So we created VoteNOW.

This project pushed me to stick to my research, challenge my assumptions, and create a user experience that was all about our USER and not about what I thought looked or worked best. I learned a lot about leading a team, and understanding each team members value. Working with a team of creatives was challenging, but became rewarding once I understood how to tap into each person’s purpose in our project.

In the end, voting is a complicated process that has a lot of road block outside even the best designer’s control. But I believe we made a product that created a remarkable experience for each of our users. Users were finally able to tackle voting in a way that didn’t send them in to an anxiety attack for the whole week, and that to me is what human centered design is all about…

Adding value to peoples lives by creating noteworthy and innovative processes for them to use, interact with, and experience.