CS 247I: Explorable Explainers
Problem Statement + Final Product
Our explainer is focused on the subject of absentee voting. In this section, we introduce the problem and our final product explainer to make the depth of the issues clear.
What is Absentee Voting?
Absentee voting is the process of submitting a ballot without being in attendance at the voter’s normally allocated polling station. Often, it is done with a mail-in ballot and requires a separate registration in order to do so. As such, college students who struggle to even register to vote seem to find absentee voting an extra roadblock along the way to political efficacy. In fact, many college students living in a new state do not even know that they can vote in their home state.
What most college students do not realize is that this process is a lot easier than it seems. What’s more, the process of absentee voting can often means a student’s vote can be worth more, especially if they live in a swing state in which the margins of victory between the two major parties are traditionally small.
The following demonstration allows you to click around the map to see where your vote matters most for the party you are supporting. Purple colored states represent historical swing states and/or states with small margins of victory in the 2016 election which may be very important in the 2020 election. If you live in one of these states, you may want to consider voting absentee if your school is in a state with a more established party affiliation.
Please note that the demo will work best in full screen mode.
It is important to keep in mind, however, that anywhere you vote, your vote will matter. Whether or not it changes the results of your state’s federal election vote, your vote matters greatly in local and statewide politics.
After reading this, it may be hard to imagine why some people may not want to vote absentee when it can have a profound effect on their political efficacy. Let’s explore some of the pitfalls that first time or new absentee voters might face while registering.
Registering to Vote
Often, the biggest hurdle for college students to vote is registering to vote to begin with. Confusing deadlines, obscure and difficult government websites, and general disorientation about the process create many obstacles for college students trying to register to vote.
Many of these obstacles may be unforeseen or unexpected. To explore some of the common issues a student may face, use this demonstration to help an imaginary college student register to vote with an absentee ballot. As you progress, pay attention to steps or issues that may surprise you or that are unexpected. Often just knowing about these helps the process feel more manageable and under control.
Please note that the demo will work best in full screen mode.
Summary
As we’ve seen in the demo, college students like Laura face many unforeseen problems. It’s often very difficult to tell spam websites from legitimate websites and facts from false information. Additionally, it’s easy to forget that registering to vote absentee is a multi-step process. Furthermore, like we saw in Laura’s case, it is often difficult to find the time to go to a city clerk or official’s office to register. This can be a major deterrent to many students who may be busy, lack access to a car, or who simply may not have the motivation to go somewhere in person. Even the alternative, which is printing, filling out, and physically mailing a document can seem like a challenge for people who have grown up in the age of the internet and email.
Knowing the challenges is the first step towards overcoming them, and through this demonstration we have explored several of the most common issues people may face.
Next Steps
It’s important to remember that the process does not end here. Simply being registered to vote is not enough. In a world filled with misinformation, fake news, and political echo chambers, being able to identify and pinpoint accurate information is paramount. Before the next election, be sure to educate yourself on the issues, keep an open mind, and ensure that your choices truly resonate with what you believe.
Process Documentation
In the first part of our project, we focused on need-finding via research.
Need-Finding Research Article Mind Maps
We read several published research articles to get a sense of the voting space. The common theme we found was that there was many points in which a person could give up during the registration or research process.
Need-Finding Interviews
Subject A: Voter from southern California, school in northern California
- Subject was abroad at the time of the last local elections and stated that they believed absentee voting was too much of a hassle
- Had their mom vote fill out their ballot for them because they didn’t want to deal with the absentee registration process
- Subject did not vote in 2016 general election because they hadn’t realized they needed to re-register in their new county when they went to college
- Does not believe they would know how to register to vote again if they had to; parents helped them initially
Subject B: Newly naturalized U.S. citizen, from Texas, school in California
- Was given a booklet at the oath ceremony and told it was her duty to register, but nothing was mentioned about specific state registration or absentee voting.
- Considers herself a resident of Texas even though she’s away at school: “Even though I live here, my home is still where my family is”.
- Was confused about whether it mattered where you voted in the primaries and how they are calculated.
All interviewed subjects said they would go to Google to figure out how to register or to find information about alternate registration.
We also interviewed another subject who stated that he was generally confused about the absentee voting process and believed that it was “too complicated” to bother with.
In general, our subjects expressed confusion about the process, had the general mindset that it was complicated and difficult, and would rely on the internet or on friends to find information.
Models, Sketches, & Prototypes
After many post-its and index cards of ideas, we finally settled on the rough idea of a series of scenarios that allow someone to help a user through the first-time voter registration process.
After our initial concept, we thought more deeply about the purpose of our explainer, the specific audience we wanted to address, as well as the main takeaways.
Interviews + Testing
After creating our initial prototypes, we also tested them on several interviewees as a proof-of-concept. We storyboarded the storyline and demoed our paper prototype.
Subject #1: Voter from Arkansas, school in California, registered absentee in 2016
- Responded well to the part in our simulation about needing to register absentee in addition to registering to vote: “I wish I had known that when I was registering. I almost didn’t vote in the [2016] election because I didn’t realize the absentee stuff was a separate form”
- Approved of the realistic scenario/options
- Liked the map, wished “the font should be bigger”
- Suggested putting the map first before the simulation
Subject #2: Voter from NY, school in CA, did not vote in 2016 due to age
- Make the setup more clear
- Residents of non-swing states may be discouraged to vote by current popup message in map. Maybe try to change this to make it more encouraging
- Liked the idea of a choose-your-own adventure
Subject #3: Voter from CA, school in CA, registered non-absentee
- Felt that the options were logical but maybe too extreme → couldn’t relate
- Was surprised to find out that the absentee voting was a separate registration process after being registered initially
- Wanted more info about the map — “more details about the swing states and why they were so close”
Testing Summary
- Amend the text in the non-swing states on the map to make it more inclusive/encouraging for voters who may not need to register absentee
- Modify the text on the map to make it bigger and easier to read
- Simulation seems to be relatable enough and realistic enough to get people to respond well
- More details about swing states can be added for P2 and the accompanying website
- Continue to develop the simulation prototype to get more concrete responses
Final Product
We embedded our final product in the problem statement! We chose to create two tools that give two major perspectives (the benefits as well as the obstacles) of absentee voting.
Through our need-finding and researching, we found that many students’ first instinct was to go to Google or to the internet to find information. As such, we wanted to create a demonstration that would feel realistic and comfortable for a student to use. Much of our final product is structured as if the user is a student researching his or her own voting process, and it attempts to put the user in this headspace.
Furthermore, our scenario is based off of an aggregation of some of the real experiences of those that we interviewed and of our own personal experiences. We intentionally chose realistic scenarios rather than extremes in the hopes that it would be more of an authentic and relatable experience for the user. The forms and website for the Michigan voter registration are the real forms available for voters. Additionally, the fake website we chose to use, while lacking in design, is actually a real site used for voting registration, which is indicative of just how little of a divide there is between untrustworthy and veritable sources.
Appendix
In the appendix we include all of the additional brainstorming material (there was a lot). For the most part, this section includes all of the documents that were not crucial to the conception of the final design, but were nonetheless important to getting us there in the first place!
Concept Maps
The common thread we found here was the confusion around absentee voting, especially among out-of-state college students.
Brainstorming / Ideation
We started with small post-its and then we slowly added more detail to our best ideas.
User Feedback Testing
After having several users experiment with our app, we identified some key weaknesses that we fixed for the final product.
For example, we changed the shade of purple on our map after reports that the color contrasted too brightly with the neighboring blue and red.
We also received feedback that there was abrupt transitions in some places, such as while Googling or while switching between the computer pages and the diary pages. On the diary page, to make the storyline more coherent, we added a modal explaining what was happening and changed the font to be Bradley Hand, cursive in order to make it more realistic for Laura’s handwriting. We added custom styled buttons that allow users to click to continue, but visually still look like Laura’s journal.
We decided not to change the diary’s right pages, as those were more-narrative based, and we didn’t want to further confuse users between which parts were told by an omni-present narrator and which parts were told by Laura.
We simplified the final end-credits page, since testers told us that there was a lot of words and not a lot of motivation to read through all of it. Since most of the information was included in the Medium article, we decided to remove the bullet points.
Hope you enjoyed!
