#interaction design

Perspective practice, I wanted to draw something cozy

As an exercise in planning, and as part of some work I’m doing for our Design Management class, I drafted a theoretical “Design Brief” for my thesis project as it currently stands.

Overview

MyVote is an online application that helps U.S. citizens vote. Its goal is to give U.S. citizens all the information they need to vote, in order to make it as easy and simple a process as possible. We are aiming to address the issue of low voter turnout in millennials, among whom this problem is greater than in other age brackets.

MyVote’s core functionality is to allow users to:

• Register to vote, or verify their voter status
  
• See when / where they can vote next
  
• See what’s going to be on the next ballot
  
• See information about candidates’ to help them decide who to vote for
  

These are the core features necessary for the first version of the app – in other words, the minimum viable product (MVP). In future versions, it’s likely that we will add features such as:

• The ability to have personal accounts, which then allows..
  
• The ability to record your personal stances on major issues
  
• The ability to match you with the candidates who most closely side with you on the issues you care about
• The ability to get reminders about upcoming elections
• The ability to save your voting history

For this design brief, we are focusing only on the MVP version of this app. For now, the app will take the format of a responsive website that is designed with the intention that the majority of traffic will be on mobile devices. In future versions, we may consider building an iOS or Android mobile app.

Additionally, we are limiting the first version of our app to the state of New York. The reason for this is that we acknowledge the huge undertaking that it would be to gather ballot data from every single local board of elections in the United States. With New York, we have the technological advantage of knowing that a digital system already exists. Outside of New York (and other states with large metropolises), it is uncommon that ballot data is accessible online. Our initial goal is to prove the efficacy of our product before implementing in other states.

During early rounds of investment, we plan to pitch to organizations that share our goal of increasing voter turnout. One example is the Knight Foundation, which has, in the past, funded numerous projects aimed at increasing voter participation. Another example is the Lucy Burns Institute, which provides funding for Ballotpedia.org.

Because the nature of our app requires us to be non-partisan, however, we are unable to look for funding from political candidates or partisan organizations. With this in mind, we will need to create a way to receive funding from individual donors in the earliest version of our app possible (a la website like Wikipedia).

Target Users

MyVote’s target users are young adult Americans with smartphones who typically do not vote in U.S. elections. They must be eligible to vote by the next election in order to use the app.

For our purposes, a person’s exact age is less important than their voting patterns. However, based on much of the existing voter research, there is an extremely high chance that the majority of our target users will be millennials. (Millennials are defined as “persons who reached young adulthood around the year 2000”).

The most important characteristic of our target users is that they typically do not vote. This can be for a variety of reasons, but the biggest reasons  cited by these people  have been that:

• They do not have enough information to vote, and
  
• They do not feel that their vote matters.
  

Additionally, it is likely that our users may have voted in presidential elections in the past, but it’s even more likely that they have never voted in a midterm election.

Project Plan

Our project plan will follow these main phases:

1. Research:Each of the project owners will research what they need to build this app within their own relevant fields. For example, Rachel will conduct user research and a competitive analysis of existing products. She will alsoresearch the political organizations (e.g. local boards of elections) that we will need to go through in order to get the information we need, and look into how the app should be built.
   Time Frame:  September 1, 2015 - November 15, 2015
   
   
2. Design Prototyping and Testing: Rachel will design prototypes of the app and conduct user testing. 
   Time Frame:  November 16, 2015 - January 15, 2015
   
   
3. Alpha Version: We will build an alpha version of the app, continuing to test with users. This version will be released to a private pool of interested users. In this phase, we will measure our success via user interviews and surveys both before and after they use the app. Specifically, we will ask users to rate how likely they are to vote in the next election. Ideally this number increases after they use the app. We’ll also look at usability issues they experienced and get an NPS (net promoter score) from them.
   Time Frame: January 16, 2015 - February 15, 2015
   
   
4. Beta Version: We will refine the alpha to release the beta version of the app. This will be released to a limit number of public users. We will measure success in the same ways as we did in the Alpha Version.
   Time Frame:  February 16, 2015 - April 15, 2015
   
   
5. First Release: We will release the first version of the app to the public, with limited marketing at first so as not to encounter an onslaught of traffic. We will aim to measure success in the same ways that we did during the Alpha and the Beta, but the true measure of success for this first release will be whether people tell us they actually voted or not – and of course, we’ll ask them if they would have voted if it hadn’t been for the app. This will require us to collect this data before and after Election Day 2016.
   Time Frame:  April 16, 2015 - May 15, 2015