Backyard Politics

Problem

Young voters lack the confidence to navigate and engage with politics.

Solution

A mobile app that serves as an interactive and educational space for young people to become better informed of local politics; promoting voter engagement and involvement in community development.

Impact

Users have easy access to local meetings and political agendas.

Role

UX Designer in 4 person team

Timeline

October 2024
Mock ups of a local political mobile app.

Problem Statement

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.

Background

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.

Only 22% of youth reported accessing information about local news in the span of a week.
Voter turnout among 18-25 year olds continues to be lower that other age groups.
Only 35% of youth feel that their community provides adequate support with understanding and acting on political issues.

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.

Research

Competitor Analysis

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.

Direct Competitors

Acti-Vote logo

Activote

Strength
User-centric information and wide range of functions
Weakness
Long load in time and buggy UI
Pogo Logo

PoGo

Strength
Appealing to youth with dating app UI and political quiz
Weakness
Lack of nuance in political policy questions

Indirect Competitors

Ground news logo

Ground News

Strength
Wide range of articles subjects presented by different sources with biases highlighted
Weakness
Users report it's hard to share links or follow a particular story
Ballotpedia logo

Ballotpedia

Strength
Clear ballot layout with direct sources linked
Weakness
No mobile app and poor information hierarchy

Social Media

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/. 

Tiktok Logo

Tiktok

Strength
Engaging news shared by community, tailored to user's preferences (location, interests, ect.)
Weakness
Algorithm chooses for user, information is often not verified/fact checked
Twitter logo

X (Twitter)

Strength
News shared by community based on who the user follows
Weakness
Information is usually presented with extreme bias/opinion

Opportunities

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.

Empathize

Survey

We surveyed 21 people to get quantitativce data to understand our demographic's general attitudes and interest regarding politics.
Graphic of "Are local election and politics important to you" that shows most users replied "yes" or "somewhat".
Are local elections and politics important to you?
A graphic for "What is the most important aspect of consuming political news" with most user choosing "unbiased information".
What is the most important aspect of consuming political news?

Interviews

We interview five people that fit our user demographic of early to late 20 year old voters. From our competitive analysis, we wanted to focus on user interest in local politics and how people are currently involved in their community government. We wanted to dive deeper into our survey results and understand the reasons behind people's answers.

User Interview Questions

Simple art portrait representing user interviewed.
Simple art portrait representing user interviewed.
Simple art portrait representing user interviewed.
"In Madison most local elections affect you more directly than national elections even do, and people don’t realize that”
“If you don’t vote, it’s really not gonna matter, but it’s what you should do”
“I think it's (local politics) a little bit of a blind spot for me, and I could understand my local politics more”

Affinity Diagram

Affinity diagram from user interviews for Background Politics.

Key Insights

User Insight Statement

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

Empathy Map

An empathy map that shows what the user says, thinks, does, and feels. It also shows its gains and pains.

Journey Map

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.

Journey map showing user persona Janet Forrest trying to find information about the local park getting shut down.

How Might We...

…provide engaging and useful political information to young voters to help them be better informed when voting to achieve a more positive change?

Ideation

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.

Board of post it notes of ideas from "I like, I wish, what if" brainstorming method.
Board of ideas categorized and voted on.

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.

The ideas on a prioritization matrix comparing complexity and priority.

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.

  • What if there was a calendar for local elections?
  • I wish I had a way to learn about current local happenings in my city and how local officials are voting on them
  • I wish got notifications of topics I am interested in

User Flow

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.

Janet's user flow going through the process of following a topic of interest.

Testing & Prototyping

Wireflow

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.

Visual of flow going through wire frames.
  • The feed page serves as an overview of local events, articles, and election dates for the user.
  • The search page functions as a search engine and an explore page by suggesting trending topics
  • The calendar page will show all the events happening on a month to month basis. It also has a search function that users can use to filter for specific types of events.
  • Event pages provide information on the meeting details, politicians attending, and source information. Users can participate in meetings and events armed with the necessary information.
  • Profile page allows users to personalize their app and access any content they have saved or followed.
A short walkthrough of the wireframe prototype,

Usability Testing

An illustrative representation of a mobile app breakdown.
source: https://www.vecteezy.com/free-vector/testing

Usability tests were run with 6 users. A senior designer also gave feedback.

  • Noticed that three users struggled finding the calendar search function.
  • Two users stated that the "follow" button and text was too small.
  • Users said that they are uncertain which post the "like" and "share" buttons are attached to.
  • "There should be an option to follow the event on the meeting detail's page."
  • "The first line next to the official’s picture should be their name, not their role."
  • "Is this design making the user get involved with their community?"

Reworking the Solution

Event page update breakdown.

Design Intentions

Style guide for Backyard politics that shows the different colors, fonts, and buttons used.

Lessons

Branding

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.

Research

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.

Overall

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.

Next Steps

Future Features