UX Design Bootcamp at dSpace
For 5 months, I was part of a team of diverse students working on a live project, exploring the stages of UX Design Thinking through dSpace, taught by Ben Bakelaar. The product is a website called VoteLight, a platform to improve politics, led by Jeff Pierce. We presented our research and findings to the Princeton Tech Meetup, July 2017. We are hoping to see VoteLight launched in the near future. It was a great experience to have contributed to the process.
EMPATHIZEOur group worked to define the concerns of the voters and politicians.
As the founder Jeff informed us, his research showed that the average voter felt it was to difficult to participate in politics. Voters needed a simpler approach and to feel their voices would be heard. |
RESEARCHWe then defined our user group (age 25-40) and conducted surveys and interviews to gauge how active they were in politics, and how much impact they felt they had in politics on the local, state and national level.
Part of our research included interviewing two local politicians to understand what they experience from voters, their obstacles in dealing with voters, and what could help them interact more effectively with voters in their community. |
IDEATIONOur research concluded that people want a better way to share political concerns, as they are not satisfied with the current process.
At this stage, using the data from our findings, our group brainstormed different user scenarios of how users could interact with VoteLight. It was determined the platform would be a website, due to its complexity, and would deal with local government for our prototype. |
WIREFRAMES & PROTOTYPINGKeeping our findings in mind, each member of our group focused on a portion of the website, developing concepts on how that section would operate and what the user would experience. Then two members were given the task to assemble a working prototype, using Indigo Studio.
View Prototype: https://indigodesigned.com/share/kcuhwhvkgamn Highlights of VoteLight Functions: Chat Rooms-individual or group conversations contained within the posted issue associated with it, and fireside chats where politicians can have live chats about a particular local/community concern. Issues-Issues can be created and posted with live voting polls, showing the poll results. There would be a deadline for voting-you could change your vote, but a system would need to be implemented to ensure only 1 vote per person, per issue. Also, you would be given information pertaining to the issue such as who created the issue, contact information to this person and other possible steps to take action on an issue. |
USER TESTINGWe then invited people to test our prototype and give input/feedback on their level of satisfaction using VoteLight, ease and clarity of use, and if they would actually use this product. The feedback was highly positive: clean, responsive, informative, straightforward, clear what to click, holds interest, are a few of the comments we received.
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