Locally Engaged

Overview
Government websites provide critical information and services that affect people’s lives on a daily basis and it is their responsibility to present that information in a way that meets the users (citizens) needs.
Project Goal
Our stakeholders have tasked us with creating another web-based product to bridge the gap between the constituents and their government.
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Target Audience
Wide range of key users from different demographics.
My Role
UX Designer, UX Researcher
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Project
Team Project
Timeline
5 Weeks (2020)
Tools
Figma, Miro, Slack,
G Suite, Xtensio, Trello
Problem Statement
The motivated constituent needs an efficient tool to find information that will encourage them to engage in their local government so that they feel better represented.
Before Starting
To align our thought and find out how we can increase civic engagement, we had to define what civic engagement is:
“Contributing to public life and participating in solving public problems.”
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Research and Discovery
Competitors Analysis

Following our research into the government greatest competitors, we were able to see that:
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People get more connected to their local government people through social media than through their websites
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Governmental websites are not civic engagement-focused
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It's hard to find specific information on Governmental website
SME, User Interview & Survey Findings
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Government websites are difficult to navigate which prevents engagement

Many participants shared the view that they did not feel heard by my local officials.

Constitutions prefer digital activism (micro-engaging) and stick to reposting on social media, sending emails from templates, and signing petitions.
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Participants want to be more engaged with their local government/politics however they don’t know how to start or find information to help them engage.
Style Guide
I created a Style Guide for keeping our visual identity of our interface consistent.

Ideating
Each of our team members came up with one design concept that had 2 commonalities:
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Micro-Engagements
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Local Focused
After we shared our concepts, we priories the terms and compare them again with our findings and merge them to one concept to be able create a prototype for our usability Test.
The 3 concepts:

The petitioning/volunteering concept was brought from me to the team:


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Usability Testing & Iterating
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Collecting findings from our user testings lead us to:
Change our logo with a placeholder for now because all of our tester thought it is the map view button
Toggle the map view and ease the map view page
Clarify some of our wordings
Ease the calendar
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Based on the testing synthesis, we iterate on the design before moving into mid fidelity design



Reflections
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My biggest challenge on this project was that as a new immigrant to the US I had no clue about the US-Government and its structure. To could continue working on this project I had to inform myself and collect information about the governmental structure, which I could achieve very in time and well to could continue interviewing constituents and follow their saying and needs.
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A main takeaway for me is choosing the right logos or icon on a website or an app is very important so that the users don't get mislead or irritated.
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If I had more time working on that project I would conduct another round of usability testing with a more open format, rather than a specifically task-based format, in order to locate more areas of improvement.