Political UX

Hi, as a citizen of the United States, for the past 32 years, I’ve grown in and out of love with our political system. I’ve grown in and out of love with our culture, society, and standards of living. Regardless if you have too, we’re still at the whim of our government.

I dream of a day when our government is so user centered that we have an app. Similar to the way Twitter almost became a journalism tool in the palm of your hand where you could publish news in real time. So, too, shall there one day be an app where we can vote on laws in real time.

Thinking about it, there is much waste in several systems within our government. The VA, comes to mind. Getting these systems to transform from physical to digital is quite the feat. We all remember how the healthcare.gov roll out went, right?

The point being, there are thousands of us, independently minded, whom have checked out for whatever reason. We’ve lost our concern with our government, because it seems so far and away. What matters most is what’s right in front of us; friends, family, jobs, hobbies, travel, etc…

Why should we worry about the government?

Well for one, we do pay quite a bit for our federal and state taxes. I treat this like paying for Facebook or Google in a way. Something that should supposedly have a revenue stream source from somewhere other than membership, merely does not. Like Google getting most of its revenue from ads, our government gets its revenue from taxes. That’s like if I setup a Google or Facebook account for the first time, and it charged me each year.

I’m ok with our government charging us taxes, but I’m not ok with how the money spent is tracked. You see, our government is not a corporation, although a lot of times it’s ran like one. I believe it should be ran like an open source, transparent, social start up. This way we can all vote and have our opinions heard digitally, instead of continually having the accessibility and awareness obstacles that allow the government to go almost unchecked.

In culmination, our government is one of the last ditch efforts, nooks and crannies where UX Design has yet to venture and overtake. I believe we’ve pretty much taken over San Francisco, but have yet to take over the most important city Washington DC.

To Be Continued…