Design and Democracy: Week 3

Redesigning the U.S. absentee ballot: ideation

This is Week 3 of Design and Democracy, where I’m keeping track of a design project I’m doing for a class at Berkeley. You can find week 2 here and the introduction to this project here.

Week 3’s assignment focused on brainstorming and ideation.

1. Review your immersion, category, and user research
2. Create a set of ideation prompts
3. Select top concepts

Review your immersion, category, and user research

Last week, I did some further secondary research on voting, collected examples of absentee ballots, and conducted contextual interviews with absentee voters. You can read more about it here. I’ll be using the observations and insights from the research to define my user needs, user goals, constraints, and assumptions for the rest of this project.

Define user needs, user goals, constraints, assumptions

A while back, I read this article that presents a framework for approaching whiteboard challenges — while my current project isn’t a whiteboard challenge, I found the process of “drawing quadrants” — defining user needs, user goals, constraints, and assumptions — valuable to my design process. To define the problem and scope of the project, I used “quadrants” inspired by the article above.

User Needs

• There’s a wide variety of people who use absentee ballots — people who go to college out-of-state, who work out-of-state, who are traveling on election day, who might have physical barriers that prevent them from getting to the polls on election day, etc. and voting needs to be accessible for all these populations, who might be busy, be located far away, or need accommodations.
• People who vote absentee value the security and privacy of their ballot. They also want to trust that their ballot is being sent and received on time. Users want to feel that absentee voting is a valid way to participate in democracy.

User Goals

• Absentee voters should be able to receive and send their ballots on time, make informed decisions on their ballots, and the experience should be as low-stress as possible.

Constraints

• I’m working on this for a school project, so there’s obvious constraints of time and resources. I might not have access to all the resources necessary to create actual working prototypes of absentee ballots and test them.
• My user research is limited, as I only had time to do contextual interviews with two college students who voted absentee in the 2016 general election. I’ll need to consider that I don’t have research from other use cases for absentee ballots.
• Outside of personal constraints, there are certain laws that limit how ballots can be designed and formatted. Additionally, the federal government technically cannot create nationwide requirements for ballots.

Assumptions

I’ll be making a few assumptions in order to deal with some constraints I mentioned above:

• I’ll likely just use the interviews and secondary research to guide my design, as I don’t believe my design decisions would be misguided in any way from the research I have so far. If I’m missing any significant primary research for use cases of absentee voting, I can look to secondary resources for information.
• I’ll follow laws regarding content on ballots, such as requiring occupation to be listed below candidate names on California ballots, but I’ll ignore laws that are somewhat ludicrous.
• As I refine my concepts next week, I’ll likely need to adjust my constraints and assumptions.

Create a set of ideation prompts

The next part of the assignment was to create a set of ideation prompts. I started off with a handful of prompts:

How might we make voting a more streamlined experience?

How might we make absentee voting less stressful?

How might we increase trust in the election system?

I did some initial brainstorming over those three prompts, as pictured to the left. Later on in the week, I narrowed my ideation prompt down to one question:

How might we make absentee voting a more streamlined, stress-free experience?

Some sketches from ideation

Most of my ideas from brainstorming were solutions to issues with different parts of absentee voting, such as the readability of text, the cost of postage, or unclear instructions. Some ideas that I potentially want to pursue further include:

• Color coding sections of sections, along with corresponding symbols to account of voters who are colorblind, to match with colors and symbols of different parts of the ballot
• Give voters envelopes with personal information pre-filled, so that they don’t need to spend time re-entering that information
• Formatting parts of the ballots by large stacking blocks rather than by columns, as they currently are in multiple ballots that I saw during research
• Make voting a digital experience — but pursuing this path would require going back to do research specifically about digital voting.

Select top concepts

Throughout ideation so far, there have been two main directions with redesigning the absentee ballot:

1. Overhauling the physical ballot, rethinking its visual and experience design.
2. Digitizing the entire process, from start to finish — from registration to ballot submission.

As I move onto refinement of concepts next week, I’ll need to clarify which direction of I want to refine, ensure that my eventual solution fulfills user goals and needs, and potentially build some prototypes and test them.

I’ll (hopefully) be posting weekly as I go through research, ideation, iteration, and refinement of my project, Design and Democracy. Feedback is always welcome and appreciated!