Case Study: MiVote
Direct Democracy
Synopsis
MiVote is a community decision making platform that gives everyone an equal and informed say on the things that matter to them, issue by issue. This platform was created by Adam Jacoby, Dr Richard Hames, Steve Graham, Hamish Hughes and Stuart McGregor.
My team was asked the follow question when we met our client: “How can we help design and support the execution of a campaign to build an active global community of 1 million people who each give $5 to MiVote, by 9 October 2017?” That shouldn’t be too hard to do in only 3 weeks?
The Team
Strategy
So with that somewhat intimidating challenge set before us we began by first discussing how best to achieve MiVote’s intended goal. We spent a great deal of time trying to develop and craft a hunt statement that would allow us to research possible solutions to this but found that this goal was too large and broad for us to achieve within the 3 week time limit. So we set ourselves a more attainable goal and developed this hunt statement instead:
With this hunt statement which focused more on helping MiVote understand their audience and how best to communicate to them. As we hoped this would indirectly help them achieve their funding goal, as having more people understand and believe in the MiVote system would help them increase their monthly donations and increase the number of volunteers they currently have.
With this in mind we began delving into research their competition and found the following 3 primary competitors:
Flux: Flux are a direct democracy party that are currently developing a voting app. Though they primarily focus on allowing their users to swap votes and accumulate capital to put their votes towards the topic that they are the most interested in.
People Decide: The People Decided is a direct democracy party that works similar to the MiVote system. Members make informed votes upon bills that will dictate how their elected officials will vote on policy. Though unlike MiVote that votes on destinations that legislators can then design laws to achieve. Also People Decide have gone the path of being a political party.
GetUp!: The reason why GetUp has been put in as a direct competitor is because a number of times interviewees where asked about direct democracy, GetUp was the first thing that came to mind for them. GetUp is less of a political party and more of a movement. Allowing it to hit a broad range of topics.
From this we looked into how how these competitors plus traditional forms of government within Australia where owning this space:
We found that most of the direct democracy competitors where more in the Political / System is broken area. Where as no one was really owning the space that was Human / System is broken. We felt this could be a possible area in which MiVote could take advantage of.
Discovery & Planning
Next we moved onto conducting a number of interviews both stakeholder, potential users and current members. The number of interviews we conducted where:
Which looked a little like this when turned into post it notes:
Which we then moved onto affinity mapping. Which was somewhat huge:
From this we got some very interesting results. We found that the stakeholders all had a different view of who and what MiVote meant to them. We also found that they all had a different view of who they felt would take up the MiVote cause (which they felt was the younger generations). What we found though was that the younger generation (18–25) didn’t really have that much interest. In fact they felt they already had enough worries without worrying about politics as well. Instead the group who cared most about politics was in the 25–40 bracket. We also found that certain words turned people off when talking to them about MiVote. These where Democracy, Politics, Policy and Revolution. The reason behind this is it made people feel that MiVote was just like its competition.
With this information in hand we tried to develop 3 personas from which to focus on but found that personas didn’t quite fit this project. Mainly because it was peoples attitudes rather than individual characteristics that divided up the target audience. So we instead created 3 mindsets.
We also found that the mindsets 1 and 3 overlapped with mindset 2 in the sense that there where users who fell in between these mindsets as outline below:
Once we had completed our personas it was clear that the messaging and who MiVote targeted with this message was the issue. So we developed the following problem statement:
Our solution to this problem statement was to develop a content strategy that focused on refining MiVote’s messaging so that it focused on bringing mindset 2 onboard. As we felt Mindset 2 had the potential of convincing Mindset 1 to also getting on board (once they saw the benefit of MiVote to them).
So we came up with a content strategy that focused on the following:
Flow & Wireframes
Once we had the basic outline content strategy figured out, we moved onto refining the flow of how the website worked, as we felt that this would be the first point of call for anyone who was interested in finding out more about MiVote. From our contextual inquiries with users we found that this was the current flow for those wanting to find out about MiVote through the website:
Once this flow was developed we realised that there where far too many steps for someone to go through to find out more information about MiVote. We also noticed that a lot of pages that a user had to go through could have been condensed into just singular pages. So with this idea in mind we developed this new user flow:
We also noticed that the websites information architecture was overly complicated and featured so many pages that linked back and forth between multiple pages. To solve this we developed a new information architecture to combat this:
Final Stages
In the final stages after we had developed our final version of the information architecture we developed a new look for the site from its original design of this:
To this:
We also ran user tests to see how well they navigated the new site. Overall we found that the majority of users much preferred the new design as it display the information in a much easier to understand manner and didn’t overwhelm them with information. It also didn’t make them feel like they lacked the required knowledge to participate with MiVote.
Moving Forward
In 3 short weeks we managed to accomplish a great deal of research and developed the basis for the content strategy, though there are a few areas I would like to explore further in the coming months as I continue to work with MiVote:
- Fully developing and implementing the content strategy across all media channels for MiVote
- Refining the website design further to tie it in more with the new content strategy
- Refining and developing the language that needs to be used to communicate with MiVote’s audience
- Develop and refine the flow of how MiVote brings volunteers onboard, and how it manages them
