An illustration that people can share in the end of the flow.

How design can encourage unusual, but good user behavior

Getting people to do something unusual and have them be proud of it

Let the constituents know who their representatives are, and the representatives know what their constituents want.

At Brigade, we are working on tools to help people identify issues they care about and then take collective actions around those issues. We realized early on, if we can show that a user is an U.S voter, then their actions like taking positions and signing petitions will hold much more weight. We found that elected officials listen to verified voters because they are confirmed constituents. So the design challenge we faced was how to encourage users to go through the effort of becoming “verified voters”.

The Verified Voter flow

Our biggest challenge to verify a voter was the amount of data we needed to collect to be able to match them to the U.S. Voter record. We wanted to create a UI that was complete, but also instilled confidence to our users so they would trust us with their personal information

Through testing, we discovered three key principles we applied to our UI

1. Set clear expectations with how we are using the data

Buttons that expand to fill the entire screen serve as backdrops for the interstitial copy, and the animation of the buttons expanding and morphing into elements into the next screen helps tie the screens together, moving the user along.

2. Over communicate what is happening next through interstitials.

3. Celebrate the completed action and make the user feel proud.

After the hard work of typing, tapping, we created an artificial pause right before the confirmation screen to give the whole process a little more weight. To finish the verified voter flow we created a playful, animated screen that allows the users to proudly announce that they are a Verified Voter on Brigade.

In the end, people were willing to put in the effort, they were proud of being a Verified Voter.

3 months since this feature was released, we’ve recorded that 90% of the people who started the Verified Voter flow completed it, and over 40% of those people shared to their social networks telling their friends about becoming a verified voter on Brigade.

Getting people to go through and fill out forms with personal information can be challenging. But we found that when people understand the payoff, and if we make it very clear on how we are using the data, then they will be willing to put in the effort, and might even be proud of what they just accomplished!

To check this feature out yourself, go download the app from a Play Store and an App Store near you!

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