A case study for a voting registration experience
Project Details
Stefan Guan - UX Designer
(User interviews, wireframing, prototyping, usability studies,
design iterations, responsive design)
March 2023 - April 2023
Users find that registering to vote is not always simple. SwiftVote is a service that empowers individuals to register to vote. The service aims to offer features that make it easy for users to register and stay on top of their registration.
The service caters towards young and adult voters who find the registration process complicated.
Research
The project began with a user interview aimed at determining the roadblocks to voting registration. During the interview, some users revealed that the registration process is complex. I created personas that distilled the frustrations.
Name: Mark
Age: 42
Occupation: Accountant
Mark is a father to two children. They are extremely busy at work and at home. Mark missed the previous election due to scheduling conflicts. They also heard that voting offices tend to have long line-ups that are unpredictable.
Name: Samantha
Age: 20
Occupation: Student
Samantha is a very punctual student that takes extra time to ensure their events are well-timed. As a student, Samantha spends a lot of time studying and thus, does not know much about upcoming elections or its participants.
Ideation
After creating the user personas, I did the Crazy-8's exercise. I divided a page into eighths and sketched up solutions to the personas' pain points. The areas I focused on were, notifications/reminders, accessibility, and voting information.
Starting the Design
After the ideation pase and sketching of paper wireframes, I created digital wireframes. These wireframes serve the purpose of resolving issues that users had with other implementations.
Low-Fidelity Prototype
After creating the screens for the main user flow, I linked them up to create an interactive prototype. The prototype enabled testing via usability studies.
User Testing
After connecting the wireframes into a low-fidelity prototype, I set out to test it with a usability study. The parameters of the study include: (1) An unmoderated usability study, (2) remote study in Canada, (3) six particiapnts, and (4) a duration of 40 minutes. The data from the usability study gave three important insights.
Insights
Users found the progress tracker confusing. They also found the accessibility button a bit confusing as it is similar to the progress tracker
The users wanted a way to contact support during registration in case they have questions or concerns.
Users needed a way to quickly research about candidates that are participating in a specific election to better inform their decisions.
After gaining insights, I implemented the changes into the mockups.
High-Fidelity Prototype
After creating each screen of the mockups, I created a high-fidelity prototype. This iteration contains a similar user flow when compared to the low-fidelity prototype. However, this prototype features changes that were prompted by the usability study.
Accessibility Considerations
Clear and consistent heading styles inform visual hierarchy of each page.
Important elements have high contrast, making it stand out from the background (e.g., buttons, toggles).
The app features a simple navigation bar to quickly jump between the important pages.
Responsive Design
After designing the app, I began working on the accompanying responsive website. I first created a sitemap to visualize the organization of the pages to maintain consistency through the experiences.
Sitemap
Responsive Designs
With the sitemap in mind, I designed different variations of the website for mobile, tablet, and desktop screen sizes. I kept the same design language throughtout the app and the website, ensuring a consistent experience on each device.
Concluding Thoughts
The SwiftVote project has been an invaluable learning experience.
I had to consider more use cases than just designing an app or
website alone. However, by going through the design process, I
believe I created a cohesive experience across the different
platforms.
Given more time, I could improve the layouts of the responsive
website to better utilize the larger screen spaces.
Thank you for taking time out of your day to check my case study
on SwiftVote 🥳.