We believe that providing an interactive and educational space for young voters to become better informed of local politics will promote voter engagement and create a place to incite tangible change on a local level.
Young voters lack the confidence to navigate and engage with politics.
They aren’t getting involved in politics, especially at a local level where they may see more tangible change.
Sources:
Civic Engagement and Participation of Youth in Politics and Public Institutions, 2014, p.1, http://goo.gl/b5uGWX]
“Local Media Access and Consumption Can Support Youth Civic Engagement.” Circle at Tufts, 23 Sept. 2024, circle.tufts.edu/latest-research/local-media-access-and-consumption-can-support-youth-civic-engagement.
Our research began with a competitive analysis. What was currently on the market, how was it addressing youth engagement with politics, and where are our opportunities to fill any missing needs? Our main focus was on mobile apps as we believed the best way to get in touch with our target user base was through their phone.
Social media has been becoming the go-to source for political news over the recent years, with over half of U.S. adults (54%) say they at least sometimes get news from social media. Tiktok and X (Twitter) being the leading platform for young adults, it was important to look at these platforms as an indirect competitor.
Source:
“Social Media and News Fact Sheet.” Pew Research Center, Sept. 2024, www.pewresearch.org/journalism/fact-sheet/social-media-and-news-fact-sheet/.
Looking at the competitors, we knew we needed to strike a balance of the serious tone of politics but a welcoming and young atmosphere. There was an opportunity to focus on politics at the local level since the main focus of these apps on politics at the national level.
Young voters who are frustrated with politics because they don’t feel that their voices are being heard need an engaging way of staying informed on local politics to make educated voting decisions because involvement in politics at a local level leads to more immediate change
Taking a look at the insights from our user research, we crafted a user persona of Jane Forrest and imagined what is the journey that she goes through, pulling from the concerns and frustrations our interviewees talked about. Never really interacting or taking an interest in local politics until it directly effected a part of her life. Here we go through finding out about her local park closing down, about her community landscape changing, looking into more information, if there is anything she can do to influence the changes, getting frustrated with the bureaucracy and political jargon, to then find out its too late but also uncertain of how to stay up to date so that she isn’t caught blindsided like this again.
…provide engaging and useful political information to young voters to help them be better informed when voting to achieve a more positive change?
We went into our ideation phase after reviewing our affinity diagram and empathy map so that we had a clear idea of our potential users and their pain points and goals before brainstorming how our app worked. Using the “I Like, I Wish, What if” method, we spent ten minutes writing out all of our ideas. This method was effective in highlighting features that our users would like as well brainstorming ideas that may not currently be in our scope.
We organized similar ideas into categories and using stickers, voted on which features we thought suited our goals for the app the most.
Every feature that was voted for was then placed on a prioritization matrix. We discussed how difficult the feature would be to make and upkeep given our limited resources, as well as how much it addresses our user’s needs.
There were many easy wins so to further narrow down our options, we looked at Janet's journey and focused on features that would help her track meetings regarding her local parks.
Our user flow was informed by our user scenario; how would Janet Forrest go about the app and follow topics that are important to her so that she doesn’t miss any more vital decisions about the future of her community?
We needed to find all the potential options a user will go through. This flow informs the layout of our frames.
The design starts off with a feed page where Janet can get snippets of local news, events going on, information on politicians, and election reminders. The user scenario starts off with Janet feeling disconnected from her community by being unaware of what is happening locally. The feed page will address that by providing our users with a broad overview that can be tailored as the user interacts with the app by following topics, events, or politicians. From there, Janet can explore the app, using the search function to find more information about the park and attend the meeting discussing park rezoning.
Usability tests were run with 6 users. A senior designer also gave feedback.
Deciding on a general vibe or branding of our concept early on would have helped us have a more cohesive structure and design for our app.
We saw that qualitative short answers in surveys can provide a large pool of detailed insights, as well as allows for a quantitative take on the same material but made it difficult to understand overall trends. We would need to have a more concise survey next time around that focused more on quantitative data.
We needed to do more testing with our final prototype to get qualitative data to understand if our solution keeps users engaged and returning to the product. This would require our product to go into beta testing. Another problem we ran into is where are we going to get data and meeting information from many different local governments. We considered AI summaries of agendas that could be found on the Northbrook government meeting details but not every local government provides information online in the same way. We would need to test this strategy with different towns and cities to see if we can set up an automated way to pull information into the app that works with different formats.
