League of Women Voters App

Project Brief

Project Timeline

2 weeks

Project Type

Personal

App Design

Contributors

Project Manager

Bennett Jobling

Researcher

Boun Stalkfleet

Interaction Designer

Megan Marshall

Information Architect

Alyssa Campbell

My Contribution

User Research

Product Design

Figma Prototype

The League of Women Voters App is a mobile app designed to increase both short-and-long-term engagement with the LWV online. The app provides up to date political news, candidate and ballot information, opportunities to donate to political causes, and helps voters decide for how to cast their ballot.

The League of Women Voters is a citizens’ organization that has fought since 1920 to improve our government and engage citizens in the decisions that impact their lives. They operate at national, state and local levels .

The Problems

LWV Website Visitors

LWV Users by Age

01

Looking at their use statistics through google analytics though, we found access on mobile and among a younger demographics was low.

How might we engage a younger, more tech savvy audience?

02

Their website is mostly static, unchanging information, but buried in their navigation there was a Blog and Newsroom that updated regularly.

How might we help users Discover up to date information about the causes they care about?

03

While showing some causes that matter, their donation flow and other site features don’t really allow users to get involved beyond reading a few paragraphs.

How might we empower users to engage in ongoing actions and get involved in these issues?

First Steps

Right away we noticed the gap in audience and device use. Low engagement under the age of 24 and little engagement on mobile implied this site was failing to resonate with younger users. Before we could start identifying solutions though, we wanted to get a user’s perspective. We began by conducting user interviews and usability tests on the existing LWV website.

From these conversations we were able to identify some common user behaviors and goals.

Pain Points with LWV.org

“I can’t find news or blog - like at all.”
“This website seems static - like it would always be the same no matter when I check it.”
“I don’t understand what this website is trying to help me do”

User Goals

I want to stay informed about politics, but have a hard time finding a trusted news source.
I want to do more with politics but I don’t know how to get started.
I need to be involved with politics because the decisions made affect my everyday life.
I often find my news on social media or while using my phone.

A Brand New Feature

We knew what people were looking for was something that would point them in the right direction.

During our competitive analysis, we found We Vote and Goods Unite Us, two sites that let user’s take a quiz to discover their political alignment, then helped them to find ballot measures or brands that stood for the same things.

It was a quick and easy way to help users know where to start - and we all knew with some work it would be a great fit for LWV App.

The Design Process

Version 01 - Sketching

From here we began ideating. I led the team in a Design Studio exercise, allowing each designer to come up with their own solutions as rough sketches. We discussed the strengths and weaknesses of each of our works, and extracted the elements that addressed the issues we had identified, and recombined them into our Version 1 design.

We kept the calls to action from the LWV Website to Donate and Register to Vote at the top of our app, easy to access without shouting at the user.
We included a “My Causes” section that highlighted political causes that matched what mattered the user.
We agreed each cause should have their own page, highlighting related news and actions to keep users informed and involved.
We included an infinite-scrolling News section at the bottom to populate with up-to-date political information.

Sketches by Boun Stalkfeet, Megan Marshall,

Version 02 - Wireframes

We wanted to make sure our design was empowering users, so once we had converged our work into a singular concept, we converted it to wireframes and executed preliminary usability tests. Our goal in testing was to ensure users could identify where to find news, how to donate to causes, and find details about specific causes and organizations.

Key Findings

100% of users found Your Causes, News, and Register to Vote were all easy to find and use.
Finding new causes was unclear. 50% never located it.
100 % felt text was difficult to read, and the test was overwhelming for most.
The User Flow to donate money was unclear. 50% were unable to.

Version 03 - High Fidelty

Moving into the Prototype steps, I focused on readability, clear calls to action, and balanced white space. We pulled colors from the existing LWV website and branding, but shifted to values that felt more youthful and modern.

We agreed that making the quiz focus on 4-5 questions across multiple pages would make it easier to navigate and less intimidating to process. I included animations with size and color changes to improve the feedback experience of the Likert scale as well.

With all our flows built out, we tested one last time.

Final Impressions

The final color choices and composition were all called out as strengths by participants.
They were left with the impression of app that was trustworthy, informative, and clean.
Information was easy to find, and navigating through the app felt natural - users completed their tasks in short times with little difficulty.

If you want to check out the protoype in Figma, feel free to click through here.

Behind The Scenes

The project was completed over the course of two weeks by 4 designers. We each brought our own perspectives and approaches to design. The key to our success in the app was our dedication to “what is best the user” instead of focusing on what we as individuals would want.

Project MANAGEMENT

With my background in directing design teams for games, I facilitated discussions to first identify the objectives and key requirements to consider the prototype “complete.”

With that in mind, I designed a road-map for our one and only sprint, working with the team to agree on the complexity of our tasks and assign due-dates. Responsibility was split based on the areas of design we were all interested in, and if no-one stepped up, I assigned the task based on the workload each team member has taken on so far.

With out sprint planned, we moved the road-map into a simple kanban board using Trello.

We found it easier to conduct our stand-ups at the end of each day, where I would move tasks around the board as needed and keep a list of what everyone intended to do once we started work the next day.

Using this method we were able to go from concept to hi-fidelity prototype in the time expected, produce all the artifacts and materials required, and avoided any work outside of the agreed upon hours set at the beginning of the project.