Design and Democracy: Week 4

Redesigning the U.S. absentee voting experience: refinement

This is Week 4 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 3 here, week 2 here, and the introduction to this project here.

Week 4’s assignment focused on idea refinement of ideas:

1. Refine concepts from ideation
2. Use sketches, scenarios, feature callouts, wireframes, diagrams, mockups, or other means of communicating your final design.

Refine concepts from ideation

At the end of ideation last week, there were two main directions for my design:

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 worked to refine my design, however, I was satisfied with neither direction.

Regarding overhauling the physical ballot, I was concerned with a few things:

• Ballots are different for each county, from packaging to content to formatting, and I did not feel that redesigning a physical ballot would address that central issue
• Generally, just redesigning the physical ballot would not address voters’ desires to track ballots, make informed decisions, or get better information about voting
• Working within the resources and time I have for this project, I would not be able to create as many prototypes and test them

Regarding digitizing the entire process, a quick search about “digital voting in the U.S. gave me a lot of concerns:

• A professor from the University of Michigan and his grad students once infiltrated a digital voting machine that was being tested over 500 miles away in the District of Columbia
• Among other issues, many digital voting machines run Windows XP, an operating system for which Microsoft hasn’t released any security patches since 2014
• While countries like Canada and Estonia have moved toward digital voting, security is still a large concern

From the quick research I did, digital voting appeared to be a battle that I did not want to fight for this project. During research, I found that voters value the security and privacy of voting, and the direction of going digital seemed to only worsen security issues with voting.

After discussing these two potential design directions with some of my friends and my professor, I arrived at a somewhat different direction– design a digital platform that would serve as a guide for voters.

I chose to go in this direction with the project for a few reasons:

• Creating a platform outside of the current voting system, I wouldn’t need to work around as many current laws and systems in place for voting
• As mentioned above, staying solely physical or going entirely digital both generated additional issues that were not necessarily worth my time or energy addressing, and this platform would address issues that I found from research without itself creating more problems

For the scope of this project, I’ll look at the use case of a mobile app for a college-aged absentee voter. I chose this use case specifically because I’ve done the most secondary and primary research on college-aged absentee voters, and it addresses a large population of young voters.

Final design

Moving forward with the digital platform as a guide for voters, I defined the purpose and features of the platform, made some preliminary sketches for the app, and created some mid-fi wireframes.

The platform will provide information that people have desired, in one place, easing the voting experience:

1. General information about the ballot for their respective voting county, such as registration, polling locations, and availability of early voting or absentee voting
2. A non-partisan source of information about ballot measures and candidates
3. Sample ballots and instructions
4. Push notifications and reminders to the user about deadlines related to voting, such as registration and the ballot
5. If possible, confirmation that their vote was counted
6. For absentee voting specifically, the platform would also provide ballot postal tracking

Sketches for a digital voter guide

A few screens of an early mockup of onboarding for the platform

Moving forward, I know there’s definitely a lot of work to do in terms of refining the user experience with this platform, ensuring that it’s providing information that voters actually want, and developing the ideas behind important functions within the app such as instructions on sample ballots and compiling non-partisan information about ballot measures and candidates.

For the final week of this design project, I’d like to create a higher fidelity mockup that I can user test with a few people, to iron out any kinks in the platform that I might not see myself. Additionally, I want to revisit my work from earlier weeks to ensure that my solution is addressing various issues, user needs, and user wants.

Next week is the last official week of the project, and I’m excited to see how all these weeks of work will come together at the end.

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!