LA County Vote — Casey Smith

Redesigning LA County’s Voting System

The Brief

How might we develop a modernized voting system for local voting in LA that addresses the current pain points of users, enhances the current speed of voting set up, and establishes certainty and trust in a digital system?

**A New Way To Vote**

For this speculative project, I worked with a team of 2 other designers to update the current analog voting booth system in Los Angeles County. Part of this challenge was to imagine a world where data security and anti-hacking measuring are infallible, and to design our concept with this in mind.

**One Stop Shop**

My team designed a responsive site that allows people to register, get informed, and vote in LA County local elections, all in one place.

Research

Evaluate Current Process

We began our research by learning what the current process of voting locally in LA County looks like. We found two key resources that clarified how the process of registration and voting works in LA County: Voter’s Edge and LAVote.net.

Insights

After evaluating what is currently available to voters, we were able to distill the voting process into 3 distinct tasks:

1. Getting Informed 2. Registering 3. Voting

User Interviews

To understand more about casting a ballot locally, We spoke with 6 voters, non-voters, and election volunteers. We used an affinity map to find the common threads in the qualitative data.

Insights

• People are sometimes wary of trusting a digital system with their personal information and their vote.

• Voter turnout is unpredictable - it's hard to know how many volunteers will be needed.

• People tended to become more civically engaged as they got older; many young people thought of it as inconvenient and didn't understand how the elections effect them. 

• The voting environment can be chaotic- there's a lot of confusion around whether they're doing the task correctly.

• Many people vote at the very last minute, at the end of the day.

• People are influenced by family, friends, and coworkers to volunteer and go out and vote.

“It was a little humiliating and intimidating- as a first time voter you think, ‘am I doing this right?’”

— Maral, Voter and Volunteer

“I’m very careful about how and where I put my information online.”

— Sylvia, Voter

Task Analysis

We did a heuristic evaluation on the current local voting registration process in order to understand its pain points. We also observed several people as they looked for local election info. and used a journey map to understand their emotional journey through that process.

Insights

The registration process had a lack of visual hierarchy, which caused confusion. Unreliable forms failed to save and submit. 
The search for local election info. is inefficient. It can often be found in more than one place online and it gets lost in the mix of other primary election info.

The Voters

Civically Engaged

ESL Voter

Elderly Voter

First Timer

Maria — The Civically Engaged Voter

From our research, it became clear that there were many personas that exemplified the voters of LA County. Considering our narrow scope for this project, we chose to focus on Maria: the civically engaged voter.

Before beginning the design phase, we asked ourselves: how can we design a new and improved online voting process for someone who is already actively engaged in local politics? How can we consider her beliefs, goals, and behaviors to make this process efficient and stress-free in comparison to the current analog process?

Maria

Beliefs
It’s everyone’s civic duty to vote.

Goals
Wants to help her community help more people become aware of local issues.

Behaviors
Engages in online political discussion Lobbies for issues she believes in. Occasionally will volunteer.

Design

The Problem

We need to remove friction in the voting process from start to finish for those already considered active voters.

The Goal

To design a streamlined, efficient way for dedicated voters to register, get informed, and vote all in one place online.

Feature Prioritization

We did a feature prioritization on our design by narrowing down a list of potential features into a MoSCoW. This gave us a clearer picture of what our MVP would consist of. The subsequent site map depicts the structure of our all-in-one local voting site.

Sketches + Wireframes

Prototype

We did two rounds of user testing: one with wireframes, followed by testing the hi-fidelity prototype. 

Accessibility

We made sure to design the site in a way that was accessible to speakers of a multitude of languages and visible to those with poor eye sight.

Engagement

We learned that voters loved the ‘I Voted’ sticker, so we took a relic of the analog voting process and created a shareable digital version of it.

**Efficiency**

We included information on upcoming election measures and candidates — finally, all the key info. availble to voters, in the same place they come to register and vote locally.

Trust

We designed for trust in a secure system by including known security conventions like the lock icon. We also included a simple, SMS or email code authentification.