Project Overview
Changing the way we register to vote
Adobe Creative Jam is a design competition that brings together talented creatives and designers from across the country. For the Fall 2020 competition, UT students spent 3 days solving a real-world challenge using Adobe XD. Although this mobile app idea served as a design that was submitted for a competition, it simulated a very standard end-to-end design process from ideation to prototyping handoff.
Me and my teammate got to:
-Create a high-performing design and prototype under time pressure
-Understand a target audience different from ourselves
-Research and apply relevant and intuitive design trends
-Collaborate and form consistent design patterns/style guide.
Challenge
Design a smart city mobile app that generates solutions to optimize infrastructure, mobility, public services, utilities, communication, public health, or resource distribution on a local, regional, statewide, or national level. It has to meaningfully and positively impact the community and improve equity.
My Team
Research + UI (Visual) - Britney Lam
Research + UX - Me
Research & Planning
Gaining insight & empathy
The first part of the research was to pick a problem that the city we chose might face and narrow it down to something that could be solved with a smart city app. This took a long time because we weren't sure if our topic met the "smart city" definition. But once we chose the topic of voting, we narrowed down the area to our hometown (Plano, TX) and dug a little deeper to understand what features the app would need.
Smart City
“A smart city is a designation given to a city that incorporates information and communication technologies (ICT) to enhance the quality and performance of urban services such as energy, transportation and utilities in order to reduce resource consumption, wastage and overall costs. The overarching aim of a smart city is to enhance the quality of living for its citizens through smart technology.”
Source: Technopedia
Site Map
We simplified the apps initial structure by organizing the different sections based on what we thought was most intuitive.
Wireframes
We explored a variety of layouts in wireframes to determine which type of layout would create the best user experience.
Define
Simplifying complexity
The second part of the research was to find how we could make voting easier for citizens in our hometown. First, we looked at how people currently vote and what are the challenges that keep them from going to the polls. For this, we researched online about the different ways people can register to vote in the United States. This allowed us to understand the voting registration process and we identified the pain points voters encounter when registering.
Key Takeaways
01
People are uninformed about the registration process & generally don't know/care who is on the ballot
02
People don't know where to find their voting registration status
03
Low-income citizens don't have access to printers which discourages them from registering to vote
04
The majority of states already allow for citizens to register online
05
The registrant provides his or her driver's license number or the last four digits of a Social Security number, information that others will not have.
06
Multi-screen systems, that offer just one question on a screen, are harder to hack.
Bottom line...
Online voter registration is safe & needed.
Designing for those who are invisible
During this stage, we wanted to make sure we were addressing a specific problem that really targeted our audience. We discovered that voter registration is more challenging for certain parts of the population.
"What is the voter's journey?"
Final Design
Voting made easy
We quickly sketched some wireframes and transferred them to Adobe XD. As I was doing the architecture, Britney helped me with aspects of the visual design and together we refined the high fidelity screens.
Color Palette
Typography
