Birth and Growth of “Can You Vote?”
User Research -> Classification
The articles we both collected for content all had similar information, so we decided it was best to narrow it down to the best four to use for our card sorting. Below are the index cards where we wrote down the specific voter suppression measures and restrictions the articles listed and described, as well as the marginalized groups they mentioned as being the most impacted.
We conducted an open card sort with 2 Stanford students not studying HCI. As shown in the appendix, they sorted the index cards into the following groups:
- General Challenges for Users
- Policies Affecting Voting/Registration
- Challenges Affecting Polling Places & Voting
- Challenges/Barriers for Convicted Felons
- Different Communities Impacted
When analyzing the results, the key insight that stood out to us was that 3 of the labels mentioned different kinds of “challenges.” Since our reference site’s purpose is to grow the user’s knowledge on voter suppression on marginalized groups, we decided it was vital to have a page dedicated to explaining the barriers these voters face. When we created a list of all the challenges, it was too long so we decided it was best to divide it into sections. The card sorted group “policies affecting voting/registration” also helped us realize that the voter suppression measures are either challenges with registering to vote or challenges with voting on election day, so we divided them this way.
We struggled with how to incorporate the last grouping in the card sort “different communities impacted” into our reference site. We didn’t want to just list these marginalized groups because that didn’t exactly give the user new knowledge in our topic. So we brainstormed how we could inform our user of the ways in which different marginalized groups are affected by voter suppression. Ultimately, we came up with the idea to have a page that shares stories of marginalized voters so others can learn about and empathize with real life struggles through the challenges previously mentioned in the barriers page. In this page, we also included a “Share Your Story” form in case the user has also experienced different obstacles while trying to vote and would be open to sharing their story on the site.
When thinking about users that can personally relate to our topic, we also wanted to incorporate a page dedicated to support those individuals. For this page, we envisioned providing various resources based on the different marginalized groups to help them in their journey to vote. For example, there would be a section for individuals with felony convictions to provide them with resources that will help them learn whether they can register to vote and cast a ballot. However, we ultimately decided to forego this page due to the immense amount of time it would have taken to, first, find different resources for each state regarding each barrier (since each state has its own policies for voting/registration practices) and, second, design and create a layout that effectively displays all the information for all 50 states.
Brand & Voice
In our content strategy, we developed the goal for our reference site to help users understand and empathize with the everyday struggles that marginalized voters face. From this goal, we wanted to convey a bold, yet professional feel to a topic that is typically portrayed online in ways that feel stiff or highly formal. When making our first style tile, we envisioned having bright colors on a dark background to heighten vision interests. As shown below, the dark background is really able to bring out the bright colors of the text and buttons.
After presenting our style tile and first iteration of our website to our class, we received a lot of feedback that the page felt very dark and uninviting. We determined that this was likely because when the style tile was applied to an informational webpage that had far fewer things to fill up the space on the background than were on the style tile, the pages ended up becoming very heavy and, thus, evoking a dark mood, the opposite of our intention. So, we decided to switch around where we used the dark and light colors in our scheme. We ended up with a cleaner display that uses a white background, dark text, and bright colors to highlight important features and achieve the mood we were originally aiming for.
In the picture above, it can seen that we also changed the title of our website from “Can I Vote?” to “Can You Vote?”. We actually requested feedback on this specifically because we wanted to ensure that our site was appealing to emotion, but not deterring those that feel like they have a strong handle on the voting process, because they need to learn more about our topic, as well. We decided on Can You Vote to entice users to continue reading by either acknowledging that they may have unanswered questions or by creating a feeling that there is likely some important information they did not even know they were missing (spoiler: there is).
Final Iteration of “Can You Vote?”
Click below to view our final iteration of our reference site. We hope you learn something new!
Appendix
