VoteForward Research & Design Sprint

Week 1

I started this project off by testing the existing platform, conducting interviews with the support team, management, and engineers, and identifying blind spots in my understanding of their users.

While most of the existing user researched focus on regular users, the client hypothesized that the biggest potential for impact was with power users; these users accounted for over 50% of letter writing in previous elections and the platform was not built with them in mind. I proposed that we check this hypotheses and do a rapid deep dive into the experience of these power users. I asked the client for a list of thirty power users and was able to schedule hour long interviews with four of them on very short notice.

Week 2

I began to see six distinct categories of frustration, with overlapping root causes.

1. Campaign selection: Not noticing which campaign they are adopting voters for and not remembering how to change it.

2. Downloading PDFs: Even when the bulk downloading is successful their are formatting artifacts due to the maximum batch size of 20 that make sorting and sending out the letters a huge pain.

3. Maximum batch size of 20: Some super users need to adopt 1 million letters for a campaign. 10,000 is common and take over 5 hours without mistakes. (This seemed like and easy fix with a huge potential impact. May also help with category 2.)

4. Column Management: Letters get lost as they are moved between "Unprepared", "Prepared", and "Complete" which becomes a problem when a bach or portion of a batch gets lost and has to be redistributed. (A search bar might be a simple solution to this)

5. Account Management: Organizations struggle to decide if their volunteers should create their own accounts and give up visibility into a unified dashboard, or share a single account between all their volunteers and hope they don't run into unexpected race-conditions or other bugs. (Account hierarchy and an org level dashboard were deemed out of scope for this sprint.)

6. Printing Issues: Even professional print shops often have 1000 page limits per print requests. (Voteforward was already piloting a program where they print the letters and send them to the volunteers with stamps and envelopes)

I sketched out a handful of ideas ranging from simple to more complex and reviewed them with the client and two of their engineers. Ultimately we settled on 3 concepts to move forward with testing:

• A button to adopt 1000 voters at a time; available after being prompted to become a superuser after adopting 500 voters. The engineering team requested that this feature not be a sliding scale or number input due to challenges with the PDF generation.

• Collapsable bundles with some subtle but useful metadata surfaced in the UI.

• A search bar that allows users to filter all three columns by bundle id, campaign, or voter name.

Week 3

Feedback from the 4 super users as well as a handful of coffee shop test subjects was overwhelmingly positive.

"Adopt 1000" was super useful to SwingLeft Pen, but the others said batch sizes that large would cause issues with their printing systems. I determined that the most flexible solution was to have 2 additional buttons: "Adopt 100" and "Adopt 500"

Collapsable bundles didn't confuse non-power users and reduced overwhelm for power users significantly while the search bar was universally appreciated with a huge sigh of relief from power users. The one request was that I add {adoption date} to the meta data displayed on each bundle and make that another filter criteria.

I made final changes, called out any edge cases, and presented my findings and high fidelity prototypes to the client along with some ideas for next steps after the 2022 election cycle. I then had a follow up with the engineering team to break each feature down and create a timeline that would add us much value as possible. In this meeting we determined that the collapsable bundles and filter functionality would have to wait until after the election, but that we could roll out the new adoption buttons ASAP.

The change proved to be incredibly successful supporting their largest voter impact to date for a midterm campaign. The client pulled me in for a 6 week follow-up design sprint to provide a design system update before proceeding with the second two features.