A platform for launching community backed ideas to direct your city council
My roles: Product Designer, UX Researcher
Tools: Figma, Protopie
Project Overview
This is by far the most ambitious project I have embarked on. In early 2019, I grew tired of watching out of date political systems like that of the U.S. sputter to a halt meanwhile millions live in poverty in the richest nation on earth. I was frustrated by the inefficiency and intransparency of our voting and political processes. It was time to put U.S. democracy back into the hands of the people, and out of reach of corporate greed and the lobbying power of political interests groups. I wanted to create a process that did not replace the one public office holders currently use, but give them a powerful tool that complements how they already operate.
The major problems facing this project are that the U.S. ranks 14th among developed nations in the category of 'most informed voters,' and misinformation & biased reporting have become very widespread. Politicians try to overcome these problems connecting with constituents via email and phone were are not efficient nor very effective. Social media like Twitter consistently creates toxic online discourse, and Tik Tok is more for marketing, however both forms reach millions of people. Overall, it's mind boggling that the U.S. government has a budget in the trillions and still has not solved these issues.
Objectives:
1) Build an online platform that serves as a space for communication and collaboration between politicians and constituents where community change can be facilitated with significantly higher efficiency and transparency.
2) Create a kickstarter-esque feature where users can create their own motion in a given state or city, and it will show up on the streams of other locals where they can 'like' it. 'Likes' give more importance when it comes time to prioritizing which motions should be voted on first.
3) Provide a monthly voting process where the most liked motions can be put to a vote. Those approved would get sent to politicians' email and Votelaser inboxes.
4) Enable politicians to have their own portal where they can effortlessly manage all the incoming motions by rejecting them or approving them. Any decisions will be sent to their corresponding constituents informing them of the result.
5) Build a filter process that ensures only motions based on highly credible sources will get pushed out to the public.
My Contributions
UX Research
I prioritized the list of major problems for both users and politicians that needed to be addressed as noted in Project Overview. I emailed and spoke with assistants to state assemblymembers to confirm the problems I suspected were real. Additionally, I researched how propositions get on ballots, which is as you would imagine a complicated and money driven process. Lastly, I investigated and learned from platforms that were already trying to inform and create change from the ground up for example, change.org, voterfied.com, kialo.com, politifact.com, govtrack.us. The only problem is that all of these do a poor job at facilitating communication between politicians and constituents.
Platform architecture & User journey
I imitated the most popular engagement platforms while maximizing transparency wherever I could. I put clear obvious buttons to take users to where they can see the platform's aggregate of user data presented in elegant visualizations. My personal goal was to convey a sense of intention to users that the platform has nothing to hide and is truly of and for the people.
Usability testing
Since the platform could not be legitimately tested until it was built, I kept tasks fairly simple for the testers. Navigation early on was a major priority since not many people have seen something like this, so tasks like data entry, motion verification, and real-time voting were demoted to secondary priorities. Also, I used different kinds of video explanations to teach people the interface and how the platform's monthly voting process works. Although there is a learning curve, I think the simplicity of the UI and user journey combined with the deep pain caused by the U.S.'s poorly functioning political system gives users a massive motivation to overcome the learning hurdle. This was evident in the majority of people who provided feedback after testing it themselves, and watching the videos.
UX Research
March 2019 - May 2019
Feb 2020 - Sept 2020
Feb 2020 — Sep 2020
As previously mentioned, communication between politicians and constituents has historically been very poor. To a certain point we must trust our politicians and give them space to do their job. However, some representatives and senators have millions of constituents making it impossible to hear each one. This reality begs the question, what if a single lowly constituent's voice could still be placed directly in a representative's inbox without being buried in the avalanche of everything else?
Social media comments give insight into how the most valued voices float to the top. If a person comments early and provides one of the funniest remarks or most thought provoking feedbacks then it has a good chance of rising to the top. Applying this mechanism to VoteLaser allowed me to create a home screen with a feed that gives users the option to like motions that they would want to put to a vote. At the beginning of each month users's motions will get published in the publics feeds and by the end of the month the top 5 motions with the most votes become a measure on the monthly VoteLaser ballot. Users then vote on these measures, and the ones with majority support get sent to a local politicians' email and VoteLaser inbox. In the VoteLaser inbox politicians will only receive vetted motions that received majority support by the community! Not only does this make the politician's job more objective and less cumbersome, it provides a steady stream of vetted ideas by the people they are directly serving.
Architecture and User Journey
Feb 2020 - Oct. 2020
Mar 2020 — Sep 2020
The original VoteLaser UI was too simple with very little functionality. The next version turned out to be too cluttered and complicated for the average user. Looking at the home screen's huge array of buttons and text made it almost feel like an airplane cockpit. I then returned to my list of prioritized problems ranked by painfulness and frequency to determine what stays, disappears, or gets moved. Some functions were abandoned while others were moved to the main menu. I essentially kept the most basic and highly used functions on the home screen while moving the more advanced ones to new options in the top menu bar.
During this process I realized that I still had not included the most important performance metrics in the top menu bar. I went straight to assembling a list of key performance metrics that the community and political pundits talk about most. Why? Because I felt the user should be as informed as the developer on the performance of a community change facilitation tool. I believe it is crucial for accountability to be inextricably linked to any platform because so many (Google, Apple, Amazon, Facebook, ClassPass) have already blatantly abused their market power, in my opinion. Not only is abuse easy to accomplish, these companies hide their blunders really well by not trying to inform users through data visualizations, and by hiding behind lawyers. My goal from the outset was to make a platform that was truly transparent and difficult to hide mistakes, so we could gain maximum trust from users. Because, if trust becomes a question then the platform will see no meaningful results. The newly added impact metrics and voting demographics brought the platform's transparency to appropriate levels. To view these metrics, users need to be on the home screen and click on impact located in the top menu bar.
Moved several less used buttons into the profile section to make the home screen more simplified
Measure Results page with voter demographics to see who and how many people voted
Heat map of voting results to see voting gradients
The above images provide fantastic insight into the type and amount of people who are using it, and where they are generally located.
Turning to the last major user journey challenge, I had learned during the research stage and from observing conversations on social media, in person, and the news that a two party system using traditional majority voting discourages a compromise. How? Because it makes political decision making very similar to a zero sum game. If one sides splits their vote between two candidates the other side will likely win resulting in parties becoming more like sports team going head to head. The culture is no longer "us", "together," and "America first", but party over everything with little to no compromise. This is why it is no surprise that congress has had an approval rating below 30% for decades, and seemingly can only pass stimulus packages, and budgets. The question now becomes how do groups of people vote for non-mainstream ideas or candidates without fear of wasting their vote on a potentially losing candidate? Ranked-Choice voting. VoteLaser is designed to educate and promote this voting method to dissolve the political divide that forms in traditional voting methods. Additionally, to combat the "us" vs "them" mentality, no reference to political parties will be made on the platform to ensure people are just focused only on the best possible solution or person for the community.
Ranked-Choice voting screen
Ranked-Choice Results screen
Finally, we have arrived at the ultimate transparency issue with any political entity, money. Let's first take a look at who has the most impact on policy in the U.S. Spoiler alert, it is not average citizens! According to an
article published by a professor of politics at Princeton University & the author of a book entitled Affluence & Influence: Economic Inequality and Political Power in America, they see average citizens as having "non-significant, near zero level" of impact on U.S. policy. In the article they describe their scientific analysis on how Economic Elites, Interests Groups, and Average Citizens stack up to one another when it comes to impacting U.S. policy. In short, they concluded that "economic elites stand out as quite influential-more so than any other set of actors studied here-in the making of U.S. public policy." So how does financially supporting a policy get firmly placed into the hands of average citizens? Place a cap on the max amount any one person can pay to promote any given motion, and give access to the motion's financial metrics to better understand its financial composition.
Given this platform has not been launched yet, this financial transparency strategy will have to be tested and adjusted. However, I can say that the people who saw the financial metrics modal when testing the platform were satisfied to see a very high level of financial transparency. Overall, I like where it is at and will be looking forward to making adjustments after receiving more feedback after launch.
Usability Testing
Oct. 2020 - Nov. 2020
Aug 2020 — Sep 2020
At the beginning I mentioned usability testing was very limited given it is only a prototype right now and the two sided nature of this platform: U.S. public office holders and users who are citizens of the U.S. I have had dozens of regular people use the platform, but I still have not secured a meeting with a public officers holder to discuss this platform. However, I was contacting them 1-2 months before their elections, so I'm not really surprised that I received feedback on the prototype from only their schedulers. In the meantime the most effective means of assessing product market fit is connecting with hundreds of different people via LinkedIn, sending them prototype videos, and learning from them. Thus far, the feedback has been tremendous! From the people who were interested enough to watch the video over 90% have signed up for the kickstarter campaign resulting in over 150 signups in 2-3 weeks.
For people who showed very high levels of interest, I arranged Zoom meetings where I sent them a link to the prototype for them to test via the online prototyping tool Protopie. Since the mechanics of this platform are fairly new to most people, the most common feedback was that there should be a short tutorial of the main functions with a few goals to accomplish, for example, create a motion, like a motion, go to your local politicians profile, etc.
Conclusion
Although this project is far away from completion, the massive scope of this project forced me to become much more organized and better at prioritizing the most important tasks. Also, finding the feel/vibe of the website was crucial for me which was a journey in itself. You feel yourself and the project maturing and growing in different ways which looking back makes past decisions seem very poor and short-sighted. Overall, I think this platform has very few competitors and is solving numerous very painful and frequent problems for most Americans. I'm looking forward to making VoteLaser a place that redefines politics by attracting the most credible, competent, and empathetic community problems solvers. The kind who can consistently make positive, long-lasting change for the majority.
